Saturday 9 February 2008

Google and blogs

A friend and neighbour told me today that he'd found my weblog. Wasn't too sure how, but thought it was probably via Google. This reminded me how I had been surprised, when I first began this blog, how quickly Google had indexed it.

So far, so trivial, perhaps. However, it reminded me of what for me is one of the key points about information management and the Web. Search. As Andrew McAfee has pointed out with his SLATES notation, search is one of the central tenets of Enterprise 2.0. And it's an area where the contrast between the World Wide Web and the average corporation or not-for-profit organisation is extreme.

Because the WWW is all web-based (obviously), but the internal organisational environment isn't.

Do you agree that this is a fundamental (and quite puzzling) point?

2 comments:

Doug Cornelius said...

Simon -

No surprise that the blog came up quickly in Google. Blogger is a Google company after all. I am sure all the linking from blogs falls nicely into their searching and indexing systems.

Enterprise search is radically different because the content is in a much more diverse vocabulary. The internet is all about html and its variants. Inside the enterprise the information is in diverse databasse with different designations and different ways of recalling and displaying the information.

I am not sure it is puzzling, but it is clearly fundamentally different.

Simon Carswell said...

Hi Doug
Interesting point about Blogger being part of Google. Maybe they do 'fast track' the indexing of Blogger posts. I think the point still stands though about how well Google and the other search engines work on the web.

I agree the corporate environment is more heterogeneous, platform-wise, than the web. This is partly because a single search interface has never been the priority. But what astonishes me still, is that where it should be a priority, namely in relation to unstructured information that it would be useful to share throughout the organisation, corporations still persist with silo-perpetuating tools even though better tools are now available.