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  • From: Ken VanDine <ken AT bizrace.com>
  • To: "Internetworkers: http://www.ibiblio.org/internetworkers/" <internetworkers AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: RE: [internetworkers] Synonym Searching On Google
  • Date: Wed, 6 Aug 2003 09:43:09 -0400

Thanks for the input Gina. Do you or anyone else have any more
information/experiences with it in a corporate environment? It would be great
to get some non-sales pros and cons.

I have read about their referral ranking and I think it might work for us. We
probably have more than a thousand different internal sites, all of which do
link all over the place. It is actually quite a mess, impossible to find
anything. To make matters worse, they don't use intuitive names... like
department.domain.com, they are more like
someacronym.somethingelse.domain.com.
They also do not use common navigation features, and that would really be
impossible to implement here, we are way to big.

Thanks,
--Ken


Quoting Gina Norman <gina.norman AT nortelnetworks.com>:

> > We are actually considering purchasing a Google search appliance for
> > work. Our corporate intranet has the worlds worst search engine. I
> > have never found a document that resembles anything I was looking for,
> > we need Google.
>
> Something to know about Google and intranets:
>
> Google's big "trick" -- and one of the main reasons why its results are so
> accurate -- is that it uses a referral ranking as a significant part of its
> algorithm. The more sites that point to a site (let's call it Site A), the
> higher Site A's ranking will be.
>
> The bad news is that this doesn't often work well on an intranet... why?
> 1) There's a much much smaller pool of referrals to build the rankings
> 2) On intranets it's often the case that there's not a lot of
> cross-linking.
> In fact, some intranets (particularly centrally managed ones with an
> integrated structure and hierarchical navigation from an intranet home
> page)
> actively discourage lower level sites from pointing at a bunch of stuff
> that's outside their frame of work. (Why, after all, should every
> department in the company recreate the main navigation system? Waste of
> work...)
>
> So, tho (to quote Jared Spool from the conference I was at last week)
> "Google has spoiled it for the rest of us" by being so good, it is not the
> case, necessarily, that it will solve your intranet problems.
>
> My $.02 (and Jared's), YMMV,
>
> -Gina
>
> Gina Norman
> Senior Manager, Global Web Governance
> ginanorm AT nortelnetworks.com
> 919-905-4801 (ESN 355)
> http://www.nortelnetworks.com
>




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