Still Searching . . .

. . . actually, still working on search. This will probably be a major part of my life now that I have started it. It appears that the effort to convince executives that it is a policy and procedure effort rather than a technical effort to achieve search goodness is a major effort.

We have the situation on our website that we are not attempting to sell things or necessarily push visitors to any particular destination, but to allow visitors to find the information they are looking for. This is often a particular document (not a web page). Thus, goodness would be

When I put in "X" I expect to see "Y".

Where "X" is sometimes only vaguely related to "Y" and "Y" is something very specific. The problem in using technology to solve this issue is that, "X" can vary for different audiences and can be only peripherally related to the "Y" for which they are searching.

Another thing complicating our site is that the primary purpose of most documents which are posted to the site is not to be posted to the site. Thus the documents are designed for  presentation at a meeting, say, and not for retrieval from the website.

I believe that search has to start at document creation. It is only the subject matter experts (SMEs) who can really define how a document should be classified. The producers of documents need to understand that retrieval from the Internet is part of their job and that they are the only ones who can really classify documents. If the source documents are correctly tagged, the resulting PDF documents will be correct.

The battle continues . . .