Here’s a short piece about the practice of adding “best bets” to enterprise search (”best bets” are essentially ponters introduced at the top of search results that direct users to documents that should have the highest ranking).

This article is based mainly on Dennis Deacon’s comment about setting up “best bets” in enterprise search on his own blog, where he points out that instituting “best bets” is often a workaround that’s undertaken after paying thousands (if not tens or hundreds of thousands) of dollars to implement enterprise search.

The first article also points out that adding “best bets” into any search application is a always going to be a manual hack, that is essentially a workaround for fixing what’s wrong with your enterprise search installation.

But what exactly is the real reason for having to institute these “best bets” in the first place? The answer is actually quite simple: poor metadata.

Continue reading »

Why do you read your favourite newspaper? What about your favourite magazine? You’d probably answer that it’s because they print content that you find interesting. Seems simple enough, doesn’t it?

But, if you think about it, you also read your favourite newspaper and magazine because of the content they don’t publish. Lots of the time, whether it’s in knowledge management or content management, we think about getting users more content — the old “if they only had the right information at the right time, things would be better” approach.

I don’t know about you, but I have more content to deal with every day than I can possibly handle. Feed updates, emails, voicemails, podcasts, blog posts, the list goes on and on (and I’m sure you can think of many, many more). I would say that around 90% of the content I get in a day remains unread (and the most often unread items are usually automatic notifications, system-generated emails, mass emails, etc.). And I’m not even taking spam into consideration.

Continue reading »