Yesterday, to celebrate the publication of our new “butterfly book” about search and discovery, we launched searchpatterns.org.
It serves as a gateway to the Search Pattern Library on Flickr, our colorful collection of examples, patterns, and anti-patterns. And, it features all the illustrations from Search Patterns, released under a Creative Commons license, so you can use them in your publications and presentations.
As we explain in Chapter One (PDF), we created our book and pattern library for a reason. We want to make search better. Or, to be more precise, we want to inspire you to make search better. So, please take a look, spread the word, and help us to make search better.
Strange Connections
I'll be giving away butterfly books at Interaction 10 in Savannah this week. If you're interested in playing, follow me on Twitter.
I'm still waiting eagerly for my copy of the butterfly book to arrive. I'm in the nice position of having senior management backing for a project to make our search better, so I'm going to have opportunities to experiment with different search patterns.
To keep the management backing, though, I need to be able to demonstrate that the things we're doing really *are* making the search better. Not an unfamiliar story to anyone who's worked on this sort of project, I'm sure. Is there some coverage of this in the book?
I've been working on first steps towards this myself:
http://tiny.cc/blog_searchmeasure
...I'm very keen to hear other thoughts on how you can work out whether using a new search pattern really does make the search better:)
Rachel