Over the last few years search has come centre-screen, thanks largely to Google, a company less than ten years old but with a market capitalization that is already 30% of that of Microsoft. Entering just one or two words into the search box is the entry point to relevant websites containing billions of pages of information. It all seems so easy. Look behind the scenes and you begin to realize the scale of the operation and the degree of innovation. The applied mathematics of Google takes a book to begin to comprehend, and then there are probably a million or more servers located in secure bunkers. There is a similar story behind Yahoo! and Microsoft, and the other public web search services. The result is that the public web search services do a remarkably good job in sifting through millions of websites to highlight those that could be of some relevance.

By comparison, searching for information in the digital repositories inside organizations is usually very difficult, with employees having lost faith in their intranet because of ineffective search, and visitors to the organization's website are hindered rather than helped by the search functionality. A search for the term ‘intranet’ on a UK central government website returned files with titles that included File30958, Microsoft Word – errs32.doc, file 22013, Business Case and Sarah in the top ten relevant documents.

It is an often-quoted suggestion that 80% of the information created by an organization is unstructured. Whatever the real answer is, there is now a general concern that the rate of growth is so great that the problems of finding specific information are now among the most serious challenges faced by an organization of any size. Many organizations have adopted content management software to manage the addition of content into websites and intranets, but have found that the distributed authorship that this software encourages makes information discovery even more difficult.