Giraffe Forum

Intranet search is appalling because people don’t want their content to get found, and the organization does not value the importance of finding.
Why do so many of the best organizations in the world have ass-and-cart search engines? The quality of search is astonishingly bad within most organizations. And what’s even more astonishing, nobody’s in charge […]

Traditional advertising is broken because it charges us time, when time is becoming our most valuable resource.
Traditional advertising works well in time-rich, money-poor economies. It works less well in today’s money-rich, time-poor economy. There was a time when we were prepared to watch something that might be vaguely interesting.
We watched the car ad even […]

Installing Google for your public website or intranet does not replace the need for professional management.
The cult of technology can be disturbing. For years, a scruffy bunch of people within organizations went around muttering: “A Portal. A Portal. What we need is a Portal.”
Some of these people became seriously disturbed and could be […]

The words people use when searching are not always a true reflection of what they’re really looking for.
Millions of people search for cheap hotels but are they really looking for a cheap hotel? Or are many of them in search of a five star hotel at a cheap price? And even if they are looking […]

Everything that is added to a classification subtracts from what is already there, prompting the question: Has more been added than subtracted?
I use a survey service called SurveyMonkey a lot. It’s a great service. Recently, they upgraded, adding lots of new features. The problem is that some of the older features that I regularly use […]

Bill Tancer, general manager of global research at Hitwise, writing for Time:
Perhaps Internet actions speak louder than survey answers. Take the cost of gasoline. Despite gasoline prices reaching an all-time high this month, searches for “gas prices” during September 2005, when gas prices breached the $3/gallon mark, were six times greater than last week when […]

To manage search on your website, don’t manage the technology or the content. Manage the task. Success is about finding, not searching.
The following are the steps involved in professionally managing search:

Identify the top 200-400 search terms on your website. These top 200-400 terms will usually represent a very significant percentage of search volume.
Identify the correct […]

The success of Google proves that if you manage content professionally, tremendous value is delivered.
Imagine you are very rich and you have a big house. One evening you have guests over. One of the guests asks you where the toilet (restroom) is. You give them instructions and off they go.
After a few turns they […]