good intranets are messy

a guy blogs about his first day working at google:

the rest of my day was spent surfing the corporate intranet. this was quite an experience. you’d think that an intranet would typically be organized and very cohesive – after all, it’s the internal network for a single company. however, google has managed to recreate the chaos of the internet on its internal network. fortunately, they’ve applied their search engine to help sort through everything. which begs the question – did the intranet become messy because google had a great search engine to find things anyways? or would intranets naturally become a mess if not for the fear of creating a huge tangled mess with no search tool to help users?

sounds like their intranet does its job. good intranets are flat, organic, bottom-up and searchable (=messy), bad intranets are hierarchical, top-down and rarely used. ok, it’s not that simple mostly but me likes to put it that way, for now :-)

(via webmasterworld)