Submitted by Alex Visser, AIIM Industry Advisor
This week I was reading a number of blogs and news
websites again and one article kind of jumped out at me. It was one of those
articles that in the first instance make you smile because of a sense of humor
but that smile quickly fades since there is more to the story. If you want to
read it yourself feel free to visit “McAnerin
Muse”.
For those of you who did not just visit the blog let me tell you what was in it. According to McAnerin, and you can quickly verify this, the search term “Open Office” will give you as a first result in Google the website of the “Open Office” organisation. So what is funny about this? Nothing, but if you try the same search in “Bing” you will get many results about “open office”, but you will not get a link to the actual open office organisation website. Only if you go via some of the other websites that talk about open office do you get to that site. This of course raises the question why this is the case. Is it a bad algorithm or is this for other reasons?
Well I do not have enough information to answer that question even though I have my own thoughts on that but it does raise however, a very important topic about how does your search engine search and why do you get those results that you get in the order that you see them? I personally would have expected openoffice.org to rank high in any search engine when I do a search on open office, since it is the official source of information about open office, but I guess that Bing rated the other sources as better sources of information about that topic. Since both Google and Bing are search engines in the public domain, I get to choose which one I want to use and over time, experiences with the search result will define the preferred search engine that I use. In your own organisation you do not have that many choices to pick from. In most ECM systems you do not find a list of search engines to pick from. Yes there will hopefully be different interfaces tuned to roles, likes and dislikes in searching, but the ranking algorithm behind it is often one and the same.
Can you predict where results show up in your search results overview? Do you know how the search engine ranks your results? You probably cannot do that, but is that not important criteria for the satisfaction of the users with the search environment? I think it is, since I know that people do not follow through with that many of the offered results to find the document they are looking for, and even if they do they still want to find it as quickly as possible. Of course a lot of these issues are solved because we do a lot of searching on the metadata of a document, which in the ECM system is more controlled than the actual text which is used for full text searching, but if you consider that the ultimate goal of using a ECM system is to FIND the information that was stored, should the search engine not deserve very close scrutiny before we pick one?
Tell us your thoughts about searching or maybe have a look at our “Information Organisation and Access” course that takes a detailed look at the findability of information or better still take a test drive through one of its modules by using the code that you can find with this link.
If you feel that maybe some of AIIM training course can help you or your organisation prevent some of those mistakes, feel free to attend one of the training courses or look for more information on the AIIM website.
The upcoming ECM courses are:
Dallas 04/27/10 - 04/30/10
San Diego 05/04/10 - 05/07/10
London 05/04/10 – 05/07/10
Denver 05/18/10 - 05/21/10
Utrecht 05/18/10 – 05/21/10
Calgary 05/25/10 - 05/28/10
Silver Spring 06/08/10 - 06/11/10
Houston 06/15/10 - 06/18/10
Alex Visser – AIIM alex.visser@aiim.eu
Follow me on Twitter @AlexVisser
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