E2.0 – Searching: The Key

Searching has spawned Google to the ultimate heights of businessdom. They did it by page ranking according to relevancy. If your page is linked to by many others, it will rank high on the results. If no one links to your page, you will see it on the “Gooooooooooooooooooooooooogle’ page. Really, no one will find you. And it is more complicated than that, but let’s pretend.

On the intranet, however, life is different. If I want to find the policy on FMLA, there may not be another document that is linked to this page within the intranet. Using a page ranking by relevancy won’t work. Also, maybe you don’t want everyone finding the minutes of the secret meeting the president of the company just had – except for a few people. How do you limit that?

Searching for knowledge, however, is paramount to the success of an intranet. Think about it: how many times have you looked for something on your intranet, hoping it might be under some folder or navigation, only to give up and email a coworker to find the answer? That’s not any way to find information you need.

The search capability must have these basic ingredients:

• Easy to use
• Find relevant/like (not only exact) results
• Be front and center

Look at VW’s web site. What is the first item? Search. If you can’t find it, it might as not be there. Searching has surpassed navigation (taxonomy) in usefulness. The new term is ‘folksonomy’ where items do not need to be in a tree folder style structure. Instead they are tagged. Search the tags and you have found what you are looking for, no matter where it is kept (see yesterday’s post).

But once it is found, it’s usefulness only begins its journey – but that is out of the scope of searching.

There are a TON of search engines. Today I saw IBM, FAST and ENDECA. I was most impressed with IBM’s. They are impressing me more and more. In an example they gave, instead police officers only finding the words, ’3 suspects’ when this is searched, it will find phrases like ‘three dark haired men’ or ‘three teens’. Instead of only ‘sports car’ it will find ‘Boxter’ or ‘Mercedes CLK’ or ‘Audi TT’.

Think of this in the learning world. I want to learn about FMLA, but can’t remember the acronym or the full act’s name. So I type in ‘family emergency time off’ and it finds what I want right away using, what they call ‘vertical semantic search’. You don’t have to know exactly what you are looking for – just be close and you can find it. A huge step for finding information!