Search Done Right

In a recent editorial, Thomas Friedman suggested that the current crisis goes beyond the financial system: it represents a paradigm shift in our conception of growth. For decades, and especially in the 1980s and 90s, growth has been all about “more:” more money, more resources, more consumption. Today, as we reach the limits of this model “more” needs to be replaced by “better” and “smarter:” better, smarter, higher efficiency use of our limited resources.

In many ways this also applies to the information world and may very well explain why “enterprise search” and providers like Vivisimo are doing so well in this difficult economy.

Information has a cost—a storage cost, a management cost and, above all, a human cost for generating it—and like water or aluminum, it can be wasted. For years, organizations focused on producing more and more information. File systems are overflowing with obsoletes files. Document repositories are piling up, each new one promising to solve the problems faced by the previous versions. But information is a special kind of commodity. It is a nasty waste that degrades over time but never disappears. Imagine our streets if every single piece of litter ever thrown away would have stayed untouched… That’s what the information landscape looks like today in most large organizations: an information wasteland.

To solve this waste problem, IT organizations do what cities do. They create dumps. And once a dump is full or unmanageable they just close it and create a new one. How many organizations have moved from file systems to Lotus Notes and from Lotus Notes to Sharepoint, each time hoping to solve the information waste problem? Each time getting a breath of fresh air only because they moved away from a stinky pile, sacrificing (or just not realizing) the value of the raw material left behind.

Information created behind the firewall is mostly used by the people who created it (or, in systems like e-mail, to the people it is force-fed to). Most information systems fail at one of their most basic task: collaboration. Repositories end up being information dumps because—like our city dumps which get crammed full of plastic bags or Styrofoam cups—they get filled with single-use information. Most information is duplicated instead of being re-used, and ends up just littering the IT landscape of most organizations, not only wasting human effort and attention but also increasing infrastructure cost.

But here stops the parallel. The virtual world has one huge advantage over the material world: recycling is virtually free.

The same piece of information can be consumed an unlimited number of times. Using it does not degrade it. Sharing it does not involve any sacrifice. In fact multiple usage often increases the value of information and sharing it often benefits both ends.

And information can be instantly sorted at almost no cost. Unlike material goods, information can be indexed, allowing search engines to sort through millions or even billions of items in a split second. Investing in search is a way for organizations to leverage better their existing information resources and use more efficiently their costly and precious human resources. By allowing information to be re-used, they save the human time and attention it takes to re-generate it and transform the accumulated knowledge of their current and previous employees into an asset.

That’s why search engines are the epitome of this resources-conscious era. They bring value not through growth but through smarter and more efficient use of existing resources. They realize what, in the material world, would be considered the holy grail of this new economy: instantly recycling information wastelands into resources.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 16th, 2009 at 5:35 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.