February 07, 2003

New ideas in intranet searching

Volvo's Dick Stenmark has a very interesting article in the Dec '20 issue of CIO Magazine: Finding the Future. Stenmark writes outlines some interesting possibilities in intranet search technology. Some of these ideas include:

  • Search results that find people as well as information on an intranet. The idea being that often times the information you need is not in a document, but it resides with a person. Expertise systems are often hard to pull off, but perhaps integrating them with an intranet search feature would improve usage.
  • Using previous search behaviors to build "search profiles" of users. Then, the search engine could notify users of relevant material when it gets posted on the intranet. This is a great way to keep abreast of new developments in a given field.

Stenmark notes that the technologies needed to add these features already exist. But, they haven't been pulled together with search engines to form a useful whole. Simple indexing won't cut it anymore, and Stenmark points in the direction of a much more powerful searching method.