Google is good, but it’s not God

Installing Google for your public Web site or intranet does not replace the need for professional management

The cult of technology can be disturbing. For years, a scruffy bunch of people within organizations went around muttering: “A Portal. A Portal. What we need is a Portal.”

Some of these people became seriously disturbed and could be found in meetings waving their arms wildly and chanting: “All hail Great Portal! Solver of the intranet problem.”

These people had intranets full of out-of-date, badly written content, and applications that were terribly designed and horrible to use. And so they believed in the magical portal software that would transform everything. Of course, it didn’t, and in fact often made the problems worse.

The same cult-like behavior can be found today with regard to search. Some managers have gone from ignoring search as a pursuit of the nerdy and lost to becoming true believers. They now think that search can solve ALL problems Internet.