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Do you want to ruin your users’ search experience? Do you want to render search painful? Do you want to add a level of frustration to an otherwise useful function that everyone counts on? If you do, ignore the metadata. In the absence of a well-run program to eliminate dated and sometimes useless material, metadata might be the only way to separate the wheat from the chaff in our search results.

Last week, I was working to finish the basic functionality of my first iPhone app. The app is really simple; it’s a list of URLs, phone numbers and bits of data our employees might need when they are traveling or simply away from their desk. Things like the number to call if they lose their AMEX card and the number for our local police (since dialing 9-1-1 on your cell phone gets you the State Police in CT). Of course it’s an iPhone app, so I can’t just put the URL or the number on the screen and hope you remember it; I needed to make the information actionable. This information is displayed in the ever popular Table View (series of rows of data) so I searched on “xcode table view string as actionable url”. Typical of search results on the Internet, I got 56,000 results, most of which were no help at all. You see, I am using Xcode (the iOS development software) version 4. Xcode 4 was only released in the spring of 2011, so most of the solutions that people have written about relate to previous versions of Xcode. If you have never tried modifying a search with “trivial” data, adding a “4” to my search string, increased the number of results to 59,000.

What I needed was for all of those entries to have been tagged with the version of Xcode they pertain to. Of course the people writing those entries had no way of knowing that something that might have been hard in v3 was now pretty easy to do. That is precisely why adding metadata needs to be a common practice; we don’t know what the future value of our document will be. We have to rely upon the people of the future to retrospectively know how what to weed out, but we have to give them the tools they need to do the weeding. This is the hardest message I have for my current users. When I talk about metadata, people often come back with comments like “but we know all of this” or “we can just go ask so and so…” My response is always “yes, we know this, but the people 3, 5, 10 years from now won’t know this, and so and so will be retired!” Of course we will have search, but if future employees are searching for the text of the then recent Annual Report, I’m reasonably sure they won’t want to see the text from the previous 60 versions. Adding “2017” to a search today, doesn’t really help much, in fact, like my earlier example, it may actually increase the number of results. Add the metadata today, and make search more effective in the future.