atw: Re: Helping users find your docs via search engines

Hi Stewart (Walker).

As a long time advocate of intelligent document management systems, one very 
quickly discovers the nightmare that document searches can become when people 
use meaningless file names, stored in an illogical and unintuitive directory 
structure, especially where people don't bother to fill in the document 
properties metadata in MS Office and many other file formats.  (In my 
experience, most people don't even bother to change the Author field, perhaps 
to 
avoid responsibility for their awful documents, further down the track.)

Anyway, I just wanted to pitch in and say that filling in that metadata is 
important, unless you want a "Raiders of the Lost Ark" scenario with finding 
every file.  If you remember, the safest place to store the most dangerous 
object (in this case, The Ark of the Covenant) was in a government warehouse / 
file store where, unlabelled, nobody could ever relocate it, except by chance.

Remember: Your metadata might not meta you, but it metas to a lot of other 
people!

Cheers,

Michael Granat
Write Ideas

Quoting Stewart Walker <helpfulau@xxxxxxxxx>:

> Hi all
> 
> <snip>
> 
> So on behalf of search engine users everywhere, I have
> a plea: every time you publish a non-HTML file that
> users will be able to discover via an intranet,
> extranet or web search engine, PLEASE ensure the file
> has a meaningful Title property.
> 
> Thanks. I feel better now I've got that off my chest
> :-)
> 
> Cheers
> 
> Stewart
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