---
title: "Book Review: Search Patterns, by Peter Morville and Jeffrey Callender"
date: 2011-03-28
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canonical_url: https://idratherbewriting.com/2011/03/28/book-review-search-patterns-by-peter-morville-and-jeffrey-callender/
---
# Book Review: Search Patterns, by Peter Morville and Jeffrey Callender
Although it only occupies 50 pages of the book, the Design Patterns section is the core value of the book. *Patterns *are recurring models that work well. They are “repeatable solutions to common problems” (82).

Morville and Callender highlight the following ten search patterns: autocomplete, best first (similar to recommended results), federated search (searches across multiple collections, sites, databases), faceted navigation, advanced search, personalization, pagination, structured results (embedded charts, videos, music, or graphs in search results), actionable results, and unified discovery.

Throughout the book, Morville and Callender emphasize the need to browse and search in combination. Because of this, they herald faceted navigation as a key strategy. In fact, they call faceted navigation “arguably the most significant search innovation of the past decade” (95).

The genius of faceted navigation is that “incremental clarification and refinement reduce results until the need for paging and scrolling virtually disappears” (116). In other words, faceted navigation allows you to first search and then refine the results by browsing the facets, so it allows search and browse to work together. Some sites even offer scoped searches, which allow you to search within a defined facet.

Morville and Callendar explain that “faceted navigation will surely adapt to every context and platform because the need to narrow exists at the crossroads of behavior and the box” (101). Narrowing is a key behavior with search. Users don’t merely search and find, or browse and locate. We search and learn the right keywords, which informs a new search, which may lead us to browse the right facets or menu, and so on.

The core of *Search Patterns* involves the design patterns, but the rest of the book isn’t without interest. In the latter third of the book, Morville and Callender explore a variety of search techniques on sites, looking at different approaches to search. At times the exploration of these search techniques seems to be somewhat meandering, but the authors note that we have much to learn about search. We only scratch the surface of our understanding with these ten patterns. In many ways, it feels that Morville and Callender are searching to find and explain more patterns from their large sampling of sites.