Although I make my living developing elearning for corporate training, I sometimes think we tend to ignore the importance of the biggest advance in learning technology yet: the search box. Although it is obviously an important tool in general, search is rarely considered as an adjunct to educational systems except as a utility. These days, employees often have to wear several hats on the job and frequently learn new skills just to stay current. Corporate policies and procedures change constantly, and although employees are trained, between the training and the use, there can be a considerable dropout. Where an expert is available, the employee will usually ask first, but that can't be assumed. In this situation, search becomes increasingly important. Unfortunately, many intranet seach engines aren't up to the challenge.

First, there's cost. The cheapest search engine is usually the one that is used.

Second, there's the difficulty of tuning results to the tasks required by different roles within the enterprise

Third, there are issues of privacy and rights to different types of information

Search queries and trends could be used to help determine what resources need to be created

To my mind, walling off "learning" from everyday practice, when you are likely to need a refresher just-in-time, is inefficient and unrealistic. The fact is that it is usually done by default, rather than as an active strategy, however. Adding a high quality search engine to your corporate intranet, and LMS can boost the effectiveness of all the other learning resources. I recently saw presentations from several LMS vendors. All of their products contain a Search feature, and all rely heavily on metadata provided by the course author. In some perfect universe, course authors will add the perfect metadata to all their courses, but I don't think we are there yet. However an intelligent search engine can utilize the content of an online course, knowledge about who is taking the course, who is linking to the course, and other types of data to make a judgement on relevance to the search query. Let's discard for the moment quizzes and courses that are entirely interactive, such as games or simulations, courses that contain privileged information and should remain secret, and focus on the many many courses or resources that contain text, audio or video. Think of all the wikis, corporate blogs, policies, procedures, manuals, and tutorials that are out there. Not just any search engine, but intelligent search that is capable of separating the wheat from the chaff and sort results in meaningful ways. As search engines grow smarter, they reduce the cost of gathering information, and reduce the time it takes to learn it. Think about how many times a day you search for something, whether on your phone, your computer, laptop, etc. Consider what you could more easily live without: learning modules and all the learning technology ever created, or Search? Granted, most of that is not for "learning" per se, but I will bet enough of it is that you would feel handicapped without access to those search boxes. If you are over 20 years of age, think about the things you can do now that you couldn't do in the past. You can search news, news archives, tutorials, documentation, scholarly journals, videos, and increasingly, you can search the distant past. Areas that still need to be improved:

• Universal video and audio text search even under poor audio quality conditions. Automatic captionin/subtitling of all multimedia on request.
• High quality automatic translation services between every language pair. Currently translation services exist, but they have a long way to go. The fact that we cannot read other languages isolates us from other communities of practice, and keeps half the world's ideas hidden from us.
• Access to all archival materials including out-of-print books, all old newpapers, all local records, and just about everything that has ever been set into print in every country. Of course this will bring up all sorts of privacy and rights issues but that will eventually need to be dealt with.
• The information retrieved must be organized in ways that are contextually relevant to the user.
• Companies and institutions often have policies and procedures that should be ranked differently from other types of ideas but employees should still have access to outside information.