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Dow-Jones/Factiva leader: Search not a good use of time
The original appearance of this entry was in Danny Weitzner - Open Internet Policy
At a keynote panel at the WWW2006 conference, “The Next Wave of the Web,” Claire Hart, Exec. VP of Dow-Jones and former CEO of Factiva (before it was acquired by Dow-Jones) said “search is waste of business people’s time. They should be analyzing information not looking for it….” She went on to say business needs information organized into ontologies with Semantic Web techniques in order to make efficient use of information. She did add that “general search engines are fantastic and will always have a place in business.”
Hart cited studies by a research firm called Outsell which made these findings public in Businessweek:
Outsell’s research shows that the amount of time that employees who work with information such as market research, financial reports, and technical documentation spend on searching for what they need is actually on the rise.
SEARCH TIME UP. Surveys conducted at the end of 2004 and 2005 show notable increases in overall information-related task time for workers in academic, corporate, government, and health-care enterprises. Across all enterprises, the average time spent increased 1.1 hours per week per employee, growing from 10.9 hours to 12.0 hours.
Worse yet, the overall portion of their task time spent on information gathering increased on average by almost 1 hour per week, making up the bulk of the overall increase in task time.
Businessweek Online, MAY 15, 2006
Needless to say, there’s a bias here between mass market advertiser funded search versus fee-based enterprise search, but the contrast is striking nonetheless.
