Findability is a term for the ease with which information contained on a website

Website

A website, also written as Web site, web site, or simply site, is a collection of related web pages containing images, videos or other digital assets. A website is hosted on at least one web server, accessible via a network such as the Internet or a private local area network through an Internet...

 can be found, both from outside the website (using search engine

Search engine

A search engine is an information retrieval system designed to help find information stored on a computer system. The search results are usually presented in a list and are commonly called hits. Search engines help to minimize the time required to find information and the amount of information...

s and the like) and by users already on the website. Although findability has relevance outside the World Wide Web

World Wide Web

The World Wide Web is a system of interlinked hypertext documents accessed via the Internet...

, it is usually used in the context of the web. The popularization of the term "findability" for the Web is usually credited to Peter Morville

Peter Morville

Peter Morville is president of Semantic Studios, an information architecture and findability consultancey. For over a decade, he has advised such clients as AT&T, IBM, Microsoft, Harvard Business School, Intenet2, Procter & Gamble, Vanguard, and Yahoo!...

. In 2005 he defined as: "the ability of users to identify an appropriate Web site and navigate the pages of the site to discover and retrieve relevant information resources", though it appears to have been first coined in a public context referring to the web and information retrieval by Alkis Papadopoullos in an article entitled "Findability": The Key to Enterprise Search. By Papadopoullos, Alkis Publication: KM World Date: Friday, April 1 2005.

Findability encompasses aspects of information architecture

Information Architecture

Information architecture is the art of expressing a model or concept of information used in activities that require explicit details of complex systems. Among these activities are library systems, Content Management Systems, web development, user interactions, database development, programming,...

, user interface design

User interface design

User interface design or user interface engineering is the design of computers, appliances, machines, mobile communication devices, software applications, and websites with the focus on the user's experience and interaction...

, accessibility

Accessibility

Accessibility is a general term used to describe the degree to which a product, device, service, or environment is available to as many people as possible. Accessibility can be viewed as the "ability to access" and benefit from some system or entity...

 and search engine optimization

Search engine optimization

Search engine optimization is the process of improving the visibility of a website or a web page in search engines via the "natural" or un-paid search results...

 (SEO), among others.

Findability can be evaluated via usability testing

Usability testing

Usability testing is a technique used in user-centered interaction design to evaluate a product by testing it on users. This can be seen as an irreplaceable usability practice, since it gives direct input on how real users use the system...

 or tree testing

Tree testing

Tree testing is a usability technique for evaluating the findability of topics in a website. It is also known as reverse card sorting or card-based classification....

.

See also

• Annotation
  Annotation
  An annotation is a note that is made while reading any form of text. This may be as simple as underlining or highlighting passages.Annotated bibliographies give descriptions about how each source is useful to an author in constructing a paper or argument...
  
  
• Information retrieval
  Information retrieval
  Information retrieval is the area of study concerned with searching for documents, for information within documents, and for metadata about documents, as well as that of searching structured storage, relational databases, and the World Wide Web...
  
  
• Knowledge mining
• Knowledge representation
  Knowledge representation
  Knowledge representation is an area of artificial intelligence research aimed at representing knowledge in symbols to facilitate inferencing from those knowledge elements, creating new elements of knowledge...
  
  
• Semantic web
  Semantic Web
  The Semantic Web is a collaborative movement led by the World Wide Web Consortium that promotes common formats for data on the World Wide Web. By encouraging the inclusion of semantic content in web pages, the Semantic Web aims at converting the current web of unstructured documents into a "web of...
  
  
• Subject (documents)
  Subject (documents)
  In library and information science documents are classified and searched by subject - as well as by other attributes such as author, genre and document type. This makes "subject" a fundamental term in this field. Library and information specialists assign subject labels to documents to make them...
  
  
• Usability
  Usability
  Usability is the ease of use and learnability of a human-made object. The object of use can be a software application, website, book, tool, machine, process, or anything a human interacts with. A usability study may be conducted as a primary job function by a usability analyst or as a secondary job...
  
  
• User interface
  User interface
  The user interface, in the industrial design field of human–machine interaction, is the space where interaction between humans and machines occurs. The goal of interaction between a human and a machine at the user interface is effective operation and control of the machine, and feedback from the...
  
  
• Web indexing
  Web indexing
  Web indexing includes back-of-book-style indexes to individual websites or an intranet, and the creation of keyword metadata to provide a more useful vocabulary for Internet or onsite search engines...
  
  

External links

• findability.org: a collection of links to people, software, organizations, and content related to findability
• The age of findability (article)
• Use Old Words When Writing for Findability (article on the findability impact of a site's choice of words)
• Ambient Findability (book)
• Building Findable Websites: Web Standards SEO and Beyond (book)
• The Findability Formula: The Easy, Non-Technical Guide to Search Engine Marketing by Heather Lutze