Doug Cornelius — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 12:48:04 GMT

Great piece.

I find that a search of a firm’s intranet is just one place to find information. Information tends to be balkanized in different systems with different ways of searching within them.

I came to the conclusion that there are four types of searching for documents: fetch, recall, research and precedent. You can read more here: http://kmspace.blogspot.com/2007/04/four-types-of-documen…

I find that these four types seem to be prevalent across the intranet and other internal systems. I think these four equate to your “mode of seeking” section.

The other interesting item I see is that most people want to browse to all information with an intranet. This may be because most intranet searches do not work very well. Much like the unhelpful example in Figure 2.

Boxes and Arrows: Comments by Doug Cornelius