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The importance of search in business

Written by: Sophie Le Brozec

Article Overview: Every minute of every day we are looking for answers to questions. However, we don't often class a lot of what we do as searching anymore.

The importance of search in business

Search is now the preserve of Google - so much so that searching is referred to as Googling in many walks of life.

However searching is such a vast area, so important and yet we pigeon hole it into a few small bands.

Obviously you have the typical search engines: the aforementioned all conquering Google, but also Bing, Yahoo!, and the like.

But then if you cast your mind wider to where search is and what search does, would Amazon even have a business if they didn't have search on their site?

Twitter would just be you, sitting on your own writing short messages to nobody in particular.

You'd have a grand total of 20 Facebook friends and none of them would be 'blasts from the past'.

In the office you'd spend hours and hours a day wasted looking through things one by one... actually hold that thought. Searching for saving time

In fact, that's quite an important issue. While search is so integrated into all elements of our day-to-day lives, it's amazing how little we take advantage of this technology in our working lives and it could make our lives so much simpler and much more productive.

Take document management for example. Not the technology, the concept. When you have a pile of documents, you have to go through them one by one, unless you've filed them. There's no quick way of indexing. Even on computers, you'll put documents here, documents there and you'll keep your emails all safely filed in your inbox. Just think though, how inefficient is that?

So we then put them in folders. Then we lose them. Then we recreate and stick them in another folder... the cycle goes on and on.

Then when we do standardise a little we start to enhance the file name to make it more useful resulting in:

* Proposal for AcMe Inc.doc

* Proposal for AcMe Inc v2.doc

* Proposal for AcMe Inc Janes v1.doc

* Proposal for AcMe Inc Jane v2 include v2.doc etc

The content will be similar, and the search will probably yield all three documents. Suddenly you haven't a clue which version to use, even if you have found the document. Which highlights the importance of versioning and making sure that the latest version is managed in a workflow and you only ever find the real document you are looking for.

I struggle to understand why, when there are so many ways to file, store, search and manage documents,that there are any businesses or employees still wasting valuable time making life difficult for themselves.

What can you do?

Search is so important inside your business and there are definitely places you can go to improve how you find things, it will always depend on your budget though. If you want to spend big then you can look at Interwoven who have some really smart technology. For mid to small budgets there are many organisations out there including Google Docs (or you can integrate a Google search), Glasscubes or if you have no money whatsoever, why not check out OpenDocMan although you may need a little technical expertise to really get the most out of it.

In my opinion and many others, it's time to change the tune. We're not searching anymore. We're finding.

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Article Tags: acme inc, amazon, blasts, document management, elements, facebook friends, folders, google, googling, grand total, inbox, janes, pigeon, proposal, short messages, typical search engines, v1, walks of life, yahoo



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