Improving how search works: November 12, 2001 issue of New Thinking

November 12, 2001 New Thinking:
Improving how search works

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November 12, 2001

Improving how search works

By Gerry McGovern

For too long, for too many people, technology is a false god of productivity. Like incurable addicts, mangers are forever buying technology that will never, and can never, deliver the benefits it espouses. There is no better example of the great technology swindle than in the web search engine industry.

"The initial euphoria generated by "easy to use search engine technologies and the cornucopia of results they provided" has given way to a more sober reality within corporate intranets that "there is still a huge gap between what most information systems can do, and what users expect." So says a recent Financial Times article on search engines, which was quoting an IDC report published in autumn 2001, entitled, 'The high cost of not finding information.'

There is an even greater gap between the problem search engines are trying to solve and the problem that needs to be solved. The Financial Times article, 'Discovering hidden riches in business data,' interviews a range of search engine vendors. Their solution: give them more results! This is like pulling a drowning man out of a swimming pool and throwing him into an ocean.

Listen to what the new, improved search engines are going to deliver: the ability to search through hundreds of file formats in tens of languages. Wow! Just what I need. I'm getting 30,000 results now, but wait till I install this new fancy search. Then I'll get 300,000 results. I mean, I've always felt I was missing something when I couldn't search through the 15 billion or so emails that are sent every day.

Here's what a search engine vendor told the Financial Times about indexing: "Indexing is a process you set up and then just let it run and run." What sort of a planet do these people live on. Indexing (classification, taxonomy) is a hugely complex process to get right. Sure, you can create an index quickly with a piece of software, but it will be worse than useless.

I have written a couple of books that required indexes. Not alone did the publisher not use software to create the index. It didn't even use me. It employed a professional indexer; someone who had real expertise and years of experience in creating indexes.

It never fails to amaze me the ignorance there is towards content. This ignorance is only matched by a blind belief in the cheap and fast benefits that technology can deliver. Again and again, the cheap and fast turns out to be the expensive and long.

The solution to search should not involve giving us bigger, faster shovels. It should involve organizations implementing better publishing processes. We need to see a lot less content being created that is a lot higher quality. Classification/indexing and other metadata creation can be supported by software, but must first-and-foremost be carried out by people. There is no cheap fix software solution for content.

The IDC report is aptly titled. There is indeed a high cost of not finding information. Unfortunately, when I went to the IDC website I wasted about 10 minutes in a fruitless search for any reference to the report. IDC should take some of its own medicine and improve its amateur search process.

We don't need more technology to improve search. Rather, we need to get better at creating, editing and publishing our content.

Gerry McGovern

Next issue: Knowledge management is about desire
Previous issue: Email: too much of a good thing?
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We don't need more technology to improve search. Rather, we need to get better at creating, editing and publishing our content.

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