<$BlogRSDUrl$> Marcus P. Zillman, M.S., A.M.H.A. Author/Speaker/Consultant
Marcus P. Zillman, M.S., A.M.H.A. Author/Speaker/Consultant
Internet Happenings, Events and Sources


Friday, July 23, 2004  

Bad Search Is Still A Problem
http://www.cioinsight.com/article2/0,1397,1610163,00.asp

Web usability guru Jakob Nielsen says that one of the most persistent challenges facing the Web is the difficulty in finding anything: "Bad search continues to be a problem today even though, from a technology perspective, great progress has been made. You can see this plainly when you use the public search engines. They're much better today than they were ten years ago. But the search on individual Web sites or inside intranets is, typically, still bad. [On intranets] things are divided up into different knowledge bases, so you've got to know where to search, and if you need to know where to search, then that defeats the entire idea. The other problem about search is the content, which is to say the individual pages, or units of information, are typically poorly described in terms of things like the headline and summaries, which is all people have to choose from when they get the search-results listing. So if there was just one thing we could fix on the Web, and for intranets as well, I would say let's fix search; that's still the number one thing that's causing people problems." Nielsen estimates that an average mid-size company (10,000 employees) could expect a return on investment of 1,000% and a gain of $5 million a year in employee productivity, simply by improving the usability of its intranet.

posted by Marcus Zillman | 4:15 AM
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