Searching vs. Finding

  • Authors:
  • William A Woods

  • Affiliations:
  • Sun Microsystems Laboratories

  • Venue:
  • Queue - Search Engines
  • Year:
  • 2004

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Abstract

Finding information and organizing it so that it can be found are two key aspects of any company's knowledge management strategy. Nearly everyone is familiar with the experience of searching with a Web search engine and using a search interface to search a particular Web site once you get there. (You may have even noticed that the latter often doesn't work as well as the former.) After you have a list of hits, you typically spend a significant amount of time following links, waiting for pages to download, reading through a page to see if it has what you want, deciding that it doesn't, backing up to try another link, deciding to try another way to phrase your request, et cetera. Eventually you may find what you want, or you may ultimately give up and decide that you can't find it. Why is this so difficult?