The shape of the internet, inside and outside the corporate firewall
I have been discussing the efficacy of our internal search tools and how hard it is to find stuff, and to be honest, assumed that it was the crapness that most users accuse their IT colleagues of. However a colleague, Bernard Horan recommended that I read “Searching the Workplace Web”, which suggests a different answer. Searching the Workplace Web argues that intranet’s are different from the internet and that more flexible, and different search algorithms are required to search an intranet; the most successful internet search algorithms are not necessarily going to work well on an intranet.
The authors made four observations.
The first assumption is that content in the intranet is often created for the purposes of dissemination of an authorised opinion or fact, or a statement of policy. There is no design intent to attract readership. One observation on which this is based is the fact that often content in the intranet is very light of additional hyperlinks to suggest further reading or to quote sources. Why suggest further reading when your authoring policy? There is no further reading to be done. Why quote a source when the answer is “because my boss said so!” For example, check out your companies expenses or travel policy. The authors argue that a corollary of this is that “in list” based algorithms…
