Findability and the Google search paradigm

Following up on an NTAP presentation I gave last Thursday, Findability and the Google Search Paradigm: Integrating Search as a Organizational Solution, here is a publicly viewable set of the presentation slides, which are in a Google Docs presentation format and include embedded links to a lot of the material I discussed during the presentation. You can find the New York Times article I mentioned about Twitter as an example of “crowd-sourcing” at David Pogue’s post, The Twitter Experiment.

I painted with a broad brush during the presentation. The goal of the presentation was to offer the legal services community a broader view, and an emerging view, of what it means to search, to search on the enterprise, and to suggest what it means to Google search on the enterprise. These are just the slides. While I gave a brief live demonstration of how our GSA installation actually functions when generating and filtering search results, you’ll have to come to the upcoming 2010 LSC Technology Initiative Grants Conference to get a more expansive demonstration and technical explanation of our implementation, including a solution (hopefully) to the problems we’ve had with Pika CMS integration into our enterprise search solution.

As is my bad habit, I went long and so the discussion at slide 72 about the real and imagined obstacles to implementing enterprise search in a non-profit environment got short shrift, and for that I apologize. I promise to do a better job with those issues at the TIG conference. In our experience getting our “stuff” organized, and hammering out practices and protocols, was a much larger time commitment on this project than the strictly technical stuff. And then there are the paralysis-against-progress problems that large organizations may experience since, in my view, they mistakenly think they have to have everything about taxonomy, vocabularies, folksonomies and metadata in place. For example, I have argued here, with our somewhat novel Google Search Appliance implementation in a non-profit environment, that we could do fine for now without relying significantly on metadata to make our project work. Others beg to differ.

In any event, I hope the presentation last Thursday was helpful. Let’s all talk again at TIG in January 2010.