PMcrunch

On December 11, 2007, PMConnection announced the introduction of “The Project Management Search Engine” product.  This is a wonderful idea, and is true to the name and mission of “PMConnection”.  Here are my thoughts on what practical innovation and usefulness it brings to the table.

What the Project Management Search Engine Does
The product enables users to search, using the Google search engine, web sites that are specifically indexed within the product.  In this case, they include on web sites that are clearly project management oriented.  Sites can be added – you can go directly to PMConnection and add yours – to the index with ease.

The obvious advantage for sites in the index is that a. those that use the search tool are interested in project management, and b. they will be searching within a much smaller universe – just those included sites - for project management products and services.  Thus, they have their targeted pool of searchers, and are part of a much more refined group of results.  Thus they are more likely to come up with a certain search term.

 

A Peak Under the Covers
Federated search of this sort has been around for a long time and is used widely on intranets and extranets, but has been brought to the web as the product “Google Custom Search beta”.  It is very simple to set up and deploy, including customizing of the interface, adding sites, and adding other search criteria.  It also incorporates elements of Google search technology already accepted as industry standard, so it is very robust, but it is hard to assess the robustness of the Custom Search as compared to the broader Google search - the PM focus notwithstanding.

Let’s have a close look at what happens with some searches.  For Case 1, I searched for “project management training” – a very common search term in the industry.  For Case 2, I searched for “online training” – a more nebulous term that is not specifically project management oriented. 

The results from searches look similar in many ways, and the Project Management Search Engine still contains the sponsored searches.  But here are the actual results, showing the top 10 results for each search:

Case 1 – Search Term = “Project Management Training”

The results show that, oddly enough, the results are at least “unexpected” in the PM search engine, as projectsatwork.com shows up in the #2 spot, whereas pmtrainingonline.com is #2 in the Google web search.  I also noticed that other well-known trainers – rmcproject.com and esi-intl.com - did not even make the top 10 in the PM search engine!

Case 1 – Search Term = “online training”

The results here show, as would be expected, that a less specific term will generate more project management relevant results in the PM Search engine.

So, the tool is a great idea and concept, but the results would seem to be unpredictable.  Part of the explanation might be that not all sites are included in the PM Search Engine, and perhaps it is configured for just certain keyword terms, but I also think it has something to do with different Google search algorithms in the PM Search Engine.
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John Reiling, PMP
Project Management Training Online
Lean Six Sigma Training Online