Intranet Journal
The online resource for intranet professionals

The Search isn't Broken - We're Broken

"People are lazy," claims Cory Doctorow, a science fiction writer and technologist who maintains the popular weblog Boing Boing. "People are remarkably cavalier about their information and how it is stored. This laziness is bottomless…"

One of the major and universal frustrations heard from Internet and intranet users alike is that corporate search engines "suck". But, are search engines the real problem, or is the issue more complex?

Despite "leaps and bounds" progress in search technology, which is quite advanced compared to other Web technologies, inaccurate and irrelevant search results continually defeat users performing search queries.

Though some search engines may be sub-par, the more likely problem is an absence of people processes and rules for managing information.

Hide And Seek
How many times have you been to a website where the title heading is either the URL or is missing altogether? And, how often have you searched a corporate site for product information only to be given endless results that link to press releases that are three or four years old? Poorly organized and often out-of-date information frustrates users and erodes productivity.

	Recent studies reveal that the average corporate employee spends 25-35% of their productive time searching for information to do their day-to-day job.

"I think searching has become a more difficult process for everyone; this has less to with the quality of search engines and more to do with the meteoric growth in data," says Josh Mugele, Director of Product Management at Semio, a California-based indexing and categorization technology company. "With more to search through, it's difficult for search engines to maintain high levels of both precision and recall."

Meta-Tag: You're It!
One way of capitalizing on the potential of the search function to insert keywords as meta tags within the actual content pages. But this requires rules and a rulebook, otherwise known as the corporate taxonomy. A taxonomy is a set of rules, or dictionary, for classifying or cataloguing information - whether on the Internet, intranet or shared drives via a LAN or WAN.

Meta tags, simply put, are the tags or data that describe the information contained on a page or site. Think of a meta tag as the tag on your shirt collar - it identifies the type of shirt and describes it with information about the materials and the manufacturer. Meta tags can be used to describe the type of data in terms of keywords, description, department, date, author, etc.

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