Why intranet search fails

Intranet search performs miserably because most organizations do not properly manage their content

Most intranet searches deliver lamentably poor results. Time and time again, I hear staff plead: “”Why can’t we just get Google?”” But buying Google — or any other search engine for that matter — will not solve the problem.

There are three reasons why Google works so well, and two of them have absolutely nothing to do with technology. Certainly, Google has great technology. It is well designed, fast and robust.

The next time you search using Google, pause for a moment and observe the first 10 results. No matter what you have searched for, you can be pretty much guaranteed that every one of those first 10 results wanted to be found.

They also worked hard to be found. They created Web content in a way that maximizes its chances of getting on the first page of search results. Most intranet content doesn’t want to be found.

I talked to a person a while ago who was just back from a conference. To get permission to attend the conference, he had to agree to write a report on the conference and publish it on the intranet. I saw what he was about to publish and it wasn’t very good.