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July/August 2005

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The State of PM Web Search
by David Curling

The Web Search Issue

I attended the Project Management Institute's EMEA World Congress held in Edinburgh, Scotland on May 23-25. During the visit to the Vendor Display and while networking with colleagues I discovered that many were unclear about the quality of results that they are getting, when they use a Web search engine. Experts say that around 20 per cent of Web information can be found via search engines. The issue is how do we uncover the rest?

It seems to me that what is required in the project management business is a select set of people, usually experienced project practitioners, with a feel for library science that know where to find information on the Web, evaluate its accuracy and generate reports based on authenticated sources.

Web Search And The Tooth Fairy

Project management practitioners consider themselves to be Web search experts but without much understanding of the criteria under which Google, Yahoo and the host of other Web search engines operate. This raises a critical issue because you believe in the tooth fairy, if you believe that everything that you extract from your Web searches is accurate and most importantly up-to-date.

The PM researcher must go beyond what they find on the web and using the citations contained in the web document, perform a second tier research of the source references. Too many people cite a document where several quotes have been taken out of context or worse yet, manipulated to craft a conclusion that was never the intent of the original researcher. I am told by a respected academic that graduate students are forever guilty of this, taking what they find on the web at face value as being "factual" and never digging below what they find on the web to evaluate if the author of the document they are quoting from used his sources appropriately. Subtleties for sure, but crucially important ones, for without peer review, a lot of what is posted on the web is nothing more than unsubstantiated opinion.

I subscribe to the maxim that "bad information leads to bad project management decisions". Accordingly, there is a need for increased skill of project management practitioners in the extraction of valid PM Web information. The PMCOMMUNICATIONS Blog is a good place to bring yourself up to speed on the quirks involved in PM Web queries and reports.

PM Knowledge Search Limitations

Too often PM research on the Web is limited to a basic search query for PM knowledge. As a peer review evaluator for a leading edge PM research journal, I can vouch for the fact that the Internet and the Web are not used for PM knowledge research to a level that is possible with to-day’s Internet tools.

Recently, I completed a peer review of a couple of papers for this international PM journal. The papers dealt with an economic methodology and its application to a stream of corporate projects. That is, the portfolio of corporate projects. In this instance the Authors had not interrogated the Internet to see what background was available on the basic principles of both the Earned Value Management System and Project Portfolio Management. A simple meta search engine for both these searches revealed that there was a significant background of research and information immediately available on the Web.

Of course, there are exceptions to this PM Web Research rule which is focused on PM papers from academe. For example, Russell Archibald in his paper "State of the Art of Project Management: 2003 - References" published in the May-June 2003 PM World Today has an extensive reference listing of web sites for further information on the topic of his paper.

This failure of PM Research results in much academic and commercial research being generated that does not use the world’s largest PM Library, the Web. Today with the introduction of search engines and search directories one can with a little effort at least “improve capability” to ferret out and research PM information of interest. That is, at the best of times you cannot assume that “all the Internet” has been visited by search engine robots and your search query report available from either a full text search engine or searchable subject index will provide a sufficient search report. However we are talking about billions of indexed web pages and much of the “PM knowledge on the Web” will be available to our search engine request.

There is a belief that full-text search engines index a major portion of the web page. The truth is for example that, Google, a full text search engine will only index the first 100K of a page including the title, URL and content. Searchable subject indexes do not index the web page text but do set out a brief set of categories which we can browse. Yahoo and the Open Directory Project are examples of searchable subject indexes.

Clearly not all the Web pages have been full text indexed in depth. However, while a significant part of the Web cannot be retrieved because of search engine limitations, a growing body of project management knowledge is exposed for our research and interest on a daily basis. An interesting side bar is the use of PM information traps that “push” regular PM knowledge updates which provide continual updates of PM information direct to our email in basket.

A PM Search Protocol

Max Wideman wrote to me "Your position vis a vis the Internet search engines reminds me of the observation that:

"Just as you get the wrong answer if you ask the wrong question, so you will still get the wrong answer if you ask the right question but of the wrong people!" Have you come across anywhere that provides a recommended approach to search engine queries and how to sift and/or validate the responses? My reply was a bit of a waffle. I allowed that I was working on a PM Blog dedicated to improvement in PM Web communications, however It seems to me that the PM information brokers that I referred to at the start of this article will have to apply a credibility number to search engine queries that reflects whether the answer meets generally accepted PM practices criteria.

Project Management Web sites should establish a protocol that upholds adherence to Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for every PM Web page posted to the World Wide Web. That is, ensure that site protocol has a simple approach to web page meta tagging and format, towards a semantic PM Web, that will lead to more efficient retrieval of Web based PM Knowledge. That is, what is “PM content” and how this can be improved for search engine purposes. All of this should be focused on improvement of the “State of PM Web Research”.

References:

1. The Semantic Web - Scientific American May 17, 2001 Tim Berners-Lee, James Hendler and Ora Lassila .A new form of Web content that is meaningful to computers will unleash a revolution of new possibilities
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?SID=mail&articleID=00048144-10D2-1C70-84A9809EC588EF21

2.PM Knowledge Management - The Taxonomy of the PMFORUM

3. PMCOMMUNICATIONS.INFO Blog
http://www.pmsearch.info/websearch/pmsearch.htm

4.An introduction to ontologies http://www.SemanticWeb.org/

5.Explorer's Guide to the Semantic Web
http://www.webreference.com/internet/semantic/index.html

6. PM World Today May-June 2005 - On Science.gov PM Alerts

Copyright (c) 2005 PMREVIEW.INFO Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts . A copy of the license is included in the section entitled GNU Free Documentation License.

David Curling wrote this article for PM World Today before he passed away June 30, 2005. We publish it as a tribute to David, acknowledging his selfless contribution to project management which continued until the day he died.


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