Keywords are not the only thing that makes a page findable

Photo by Sarah Ziegler

Many people believe that keywords are the best way of making content easier to find. While there is some truth to this, it is pretty evident that as semantic search grows, the power of keywords in relation to other influencers diminishes. In short, in the current day, the power of keywords does not always provide the best way of making a piece of content findable. As I continue my path down of translating ideas from David's book to apply to internal enterprise search, I realize more and more that this basic concept is especially true for enterprise search.

Let's dig a little bit. It is a guarantee that when semantic search is involved, the search query always contains words which are not declared keywords on some of the pages returned in the search results. Instead these words come from other locations, from the content itself, from the comments on the content page, from social media that references the page. In addition, if the content or the page supports the ability to rate or like the content, these items can definitely influence the search results.

For employees to truly benefit from semantic in the enterprise, helping them to find the information they are looking for, social capabilities start to really have a huge influence that can't be ignored. While keywords might help, the content of the page, being written well, using the correct nomenclature on the page and allowing people to interact with the content in as many ways as possible becomes a very important factor.

This note was inspired by +David Amerland 's book, Google Semantic Search - Amazon location 2056

Fulfillment through learning

Photo by Ben Ziegler

I learned from someone (wish I remembered who) that as you learn there is a point where you start to plateau. And as you plateau, you become complacent because you believe you have more knowledge than others.  And because you believe you know more, you stop pushing to learn more.

To keep from being complacent you need to jump to the next thing, to learn something new, taking the risk of jumping from what you are an expert on to something that you are not the expert on, for learning is what truly fulfill us.

Don't stop learning.

Corporate Publisher - you are more than just someone on a project

Photo by Eric Ziegler

So, its been several weeks since I last posted. No good reason except for life was moving faster than I could write. Picking up where I left off, David writes about the need for entrepreneur to realize that while they might have set their company up to sell something, they still need to be a publisher. Why? My perspective is that it is simple, as an entrepreneur, you need to do marketing.

I have been in many position in the enterprise where this same concept applies. If you worked on an project implementation that crosses a large part of the organization, you are very much like the entrepreneur. You need to become a publisher, a marketer, a cheerleader. Unfortunately, teams that provide services to other parts of the corporation often forget that they need to do marketing.

This note was inspired by +David Amerland 's book, Google Semantic Search - Amazon location 1955.