Site search management and design

I've been involved with managing and designing site search and web search services on the web since the end of the 1990s, and have blogged extensively on the topic. In 2008 I presented "Taking the 'Ooh' out of Google: Getting site search right" at Euro IA in AMsterdam, which was a complete overview of how to make a distinctive site search, based on examples from European newspaper websites.

Over the course of the last couple years I've written several overviews of the strengths and weaknesses of site search across British newspaper websites, including my attempt at a "Site search smackdown", and a series of reviews concentrating on local newspaper search.

Since 2008 I've been product manager for site search on guardian.co.uk - and over on the Inside Guardian blog I've posted about the redesign process and the most popular searches of 2009.

There are several series of articles on this site looking at the BBC's search engine, a project I worked on for a couple of years. Web search at the BBC is a retrospective set of blog posts charting the development of the BBC's online web search engine from launch in 2002 until closure in 2009. The web search function was fiercely criticised, and in 2007 I wrote about one of the most notorious BBCi Search impartiality problems, as well as writing a critique of the 2006 search redesign.

"A day in the life of BBCi Search" is based on a presentation I gave about search log analysis within the BBC in 2003, and "How search can help you understand your audience" expands upon some of the themes. In 2004 I was lucky enough to meet search engine pioneer Professor Karen Spärk Jones, the topic of my 'Ada Lovelace Day' blog post in 2009.