Google Sites, the missing link
In the olden physical library days, books were catalogued and numbered according to a common Dewey Decimal Classification system. Each book belonged on a specific shelf. You looked up books by author or by topic by consulting an index card system. The index card DDC information would then direct you to the right shelf. It worked! It worked because there were only so many books one could store in a library.
The scale of the internet made such a catalog impossible, even though Yahoo originally tried it. Altavista, Lycos, Excite and a host of other companies worked very hard at making finding information online easier through search engines. As we all know, it was Google who perfected finding needles in the internet haystack.
That is, for as long as the haystack is public. Once you within the confines of a corporation, all bets are off. Of course, Google’s web crawlers have no access to the servers behind the firewall. But what happens if a company hosts their files in Google Drive, a private cloud drive, hosted by Google? In my experience, astoundingly, search doesn’t work in Google Drive.
Also the cataloging in Google Drive folders is a problem. The Google Drive folder sharing approach is a mystery for many people. I have a My Drive view and can make portions of it selectively available in your My Drive. This can be confusing as we believe we are looking at the same shared information. Yet, it can be different. Only portions may have been shared, or it may have mapped it differently in your My Drive. There are many things which can screw it up.
Google Team Drives meant to solve some of this. They didn’t, as team membership and permissions can get complex. The more recent Shared Drive concept provides hope. I understand it as a set of corporation-wide shared and discoverable drives where everybody has the same view of the world.
In a corporate world where one has figured out a working folder structure, there remains the problem of findability. The true solution is to fix search.
A companion solution to this is a Portal, a landing place, organized by how the company operates, and with links to the right documents. It is a Dewey crutch, yet one which can be quite effective. It may even be key to fixing search. After all, Google Search started with the Page Rank algorithm applied to webpages and their links.
Google Sites is such a Portal solution. However it is clunky, has limited functionality, flexibility, and appears to neglected by Google.
As a result, I see folks build crafty workarounds using e.g., Atlassian Confluence. As Atlassian Confluence overlaps in functionality with Google Docs and Sites, you end up somewhere in an even more confused no-mans land. It is as if Dewey created both a catalog and a typewriter, wrapped in the same product.
By fixing Private Search and investing in Sites, Google could solve a lot of companies’ information sharing problems.
For information systems to work, you need to use single-purpose and simple tools. Every time, companies try to blend capabilities, it becomes a mess.