37signals released their e-commerce search report from 2003 reviewing the search engines behind 25 online shops.

It’s an interesting read for two reasons: a) it exposes a good methodology for performing such reviews b) it includes an excellent “Best practices” section highlighting what a good search engine should offer. Although the best practices are written with e-commerce sites in mind, there are a lot of ideas to improve search engines used by web applications / services.

Finally I should note that the layout of the report is excellent.