Search - Implications on Knowledge Work

This post was sparked by a couple of recent articles:

Babson Knowledge: How Google Plans to Change the Scope of Googling (And Why Information and Knowledge Workers Should Care).

InfoWorld: Reinventing the Intranet

These articles point out what we already know:

It is generally easier to find stuff that is in the mass of public information than it is to find stuff inside our own corporations.

While there is some defense of Corporate IT in that it is harder to get at information that is stored in a wide variety of systems, e.g., ERP, CRM, etc. It still is surprising that we are not seeing as rapid adoption of search technologies inside the firewall. But, likely, you are at fault as well, after all,

What desktop search are you using?

If the answer is "none" ... then get with it. Desktop search via tools such as X1 will change your life. You will find that you don't spend nearly the time worrying about categorizing your own content into folders. I used to spend a lot of time worrying about rules in my email. Not anymore. Just search and you will find.

Soon, these tools will be expanding out to your internal network, your internal systems and basically every piece of information.

Interestingly, I think the algorithms that Google relies on for searching the public web (based on incoming links) will not work nearly as well as older algorithms based on frequency, semantic interpretation and other techniques.

Keywords: eLearning Trends, eLearning 2.0, Web 2.0