Google Mini Minus Link Love

First-hand report from an organization using the Google-mini appliance. Mostly run-of-the-mill observations, but it surfaces a limitation of Goog-in-the-enterprise that hadn’t occurred to me: Google’s secret sauce is PageRank, and PageRank depends on link love. But if what you’re indexing is a few thousand Word/Excel/PDF documents that don’t link to each other, there is no link love to be had, and you’re back to Alta Vista days and plain old keyword frequency.

If the interlinking metadata between documents is non-existent, and PageRank is zero on every one of your documents, you’re back to keyword frequency matching.

That’s not really a criticism of the Google appliances themselves, as I’m not sure what could be done about it, but it seems to me a bit like selling an invention known for one special feature… without that feature. Big Macs without the secret sauce.

Music: Captain Beefheart and His Magi :: Grown So Ugly

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