Not all docs are public

Here's a quote from an interview in this week's CIDM Information Management. It's an intelligent and literate quote but I'm going to take exception to it anyway: "I think that Google changed our world as technical communicators. All of a sudden you could type in a series of random words and get a very close match to what you were looking for. That makes traditional informational organization obsolete: the back-of-the-book index and the table of contents go out the window. People want their little sound bite that corresponds with their one question that they have right then. We can no longer provide big fat manuals." (link: Tracy Baker Shares 20 years of Tech Comm Experience)

I have heard the sentiment several times lately that Google has made traditional information organization obsolete. The problem is: of the ten companies that have employed me as a technical writer, only two produced documentation that was publicly available on the internet. At my current job, my docs are not public.

When my docs have been available through Google, readers tended to use Google at the start of their doc search. Google is undeniably the best route, and can lead to a slew of information sources.


Readers did not equate the search functionality in the docs with Google. In fact, the thing that beats every search engine including Google is a good old fashioned, well-prepared index. Not that many writers ever bothered to make proper indexes, even when docs had them (and unfortunately, most users seldom took full advantage of them either).

Even when docs are public, having Google does not negate the need for an index and table of contents. When Google is available to search a doc set people often use it to enter the doc, but once they're in they need navigation aids - because frequently they need to read more than one topic.

Also, there's nothing new here: people have always wanted that little sound bite that answered their one question. Noone has ever wanted to read a word more than they need to get their question answered. In fact, people often turn to the docs when they're frustrated, angry, and simply not in the mood to waste more time.

The reason we produce big fat manuals is because there's a lot of stuff that users need to know. I'm not talking about products for home use as I've never had anything to do with that kind of writing. But for business applications there's often a lot of complexity.

You might argue that it's important to know what proportion of all the docs in the world are available on the web. That's moot, though. What's important is that you can't make sweeping comments about changes in the industry when many of us are still writing docs that aren't made public.

In fact, there is far too much generalization about docs. Technical documentation covers a huge range of material, from the instructions on a box of crayons to the specs of a space shuttle. We should all be more precise about context.

But even more than that, I'm not convinced that the fundamentals of effective communication are changing that much. Here's an example. Way back in the 90s I worked at a company that was migrating to topic-based writing. When I did information typing of my books to create those topics, there was virtually nothing to change - every section mapped to a topic with a clearly defined type and noone could see any required changes to the structure or content. That was because we had great processes for planning books. Topic-based writing provides structure that should have been there anyway.