[Sigia-l] Findability

[George Olsen]

On 1/27/03 5:03 PM, "Boniface Lau" <boniface_lau at compuserve.com> wrote:
> IMO, hand-crafted categorization is just too expensive and is heading
> towards extinction!

And why are information retrieval and categorization mutually exclusive?

I'm working with a financial services company on an extranet for
institutional investment clients. These folks' interest is in efficiency.
They'd _much_ rather click on links that take them to the latest research
reports than have to enter search queries. Especially when the categories
were based on understanding how they thought about the information
themselves.

If I forced the clients to use a Google interface, they'd scream because
it's shifting the cognitive overhead to them. They'd need to remember the
names of specific reports, rather than being cued by the categories.
(Believe me even complex search terms like "top u.s. equity holdings" would
turn up a lot of unwanted results.)

'Course there's the pragmatic problem that 1) it's a new site that 2)
contains proprietary information, so it's hard to build up a Google profile
on that.

As has been said before, different solutions for different problems.