I thought Euen Semple’s blog today comparing the ineffectiveness of most Intranet (enterprise) search engines with social media as a means of getting to relevant information and knowledge was spot on. Not much I can add, so suggest you read the source. All at bit close to the heart, since I’m currently doing some work with a large gov agency who are implementing a new Intranet search engine, and also a local gov agency who are developing social media tools. I think part of the answer to this conundrum is to start integrating things like discussion forums into the enterprise’s Intranet search index – the best of both worlds maybe?
Intranet vs. Social Media
Stephen is Director and founder of Collabor8now Ltd, an organization focussed on developing collaborative environments (e.g. Communities of Practice) and the integration of knowledge management tools and processes to support business improvement. He is a certified knowledge manager with the Knowledge Management Institute (KMI) and the author of several published research papers on collaborative behaviours and information technology.
Actually I should have said that our forums, wikis and blogs were all indexed by the main search and presented as separate elements of the search results.
How search works is undergoing the beginnings of a revolution, led by Jimmy Wales, with his Search Wikia project [1]. I think that the way we define search will change dramatically over the next couple of years, with the rise in importance of semantics, microformats and social media.
[1] http://search.wikia.com