Findability is just So Last Year by Tony Russell-Rose.
From the post:
Last week I attended the October edition of the London Enterprise Search meetup, which gave us (among other things) our usual monthly fix of great talks and follow up discussions. This time, one of the topics that particularly caught my attention was the question of how to measure the effectiveness of enterprise search. Several possible approaches were suggested, including measuring how frequently users can “find what they are looking for” within a fixed period of time (e.g. two minutes).
Now I’m not saying findability isn’t important, but in my opinion metrics like this really seem to miss the point. Leaving aside the methodological issues in defining exactly what is meant by “find what they are looking for”, they seem predicated on the notion that search is all about finding known items, as if to suggest that once they’re found, everyone can go home. In my experience, nothing could be further from the truth.
Not to ask it too sharply but are topic maps by themselves one-trick ponies?
A topic map can collocate information about a subject, along with associations to other subjects, perhaps with a bow on top, but then what?
What if there were an expectation of collocation of information as part of search engines and other information interfaces?
Topic maps as an embedded component in information interfaces?
In Going Head to Head with Google we saw how a speciality search engine could eat Google’s lunch on relevant search results. What about speciality collocation rather than “we omitted some duplicate results” type stuff?
Would not have to take over the click-through business all at once but like my father-in-law would say: “…just like eating lettuce, one leaf at a time.”