Dear Kaskus and Koprol, Please Fix Your Search Engine!

I was at Grand Indonesia this morning to meet a colleague at Starbucks Coffe. As one of Koprol’s devotee, I immediately turned on my laptop and tried to check in at Starbucks Grand Indonesia.

I then tried to find my location on Koprol, but unfortunately keywords “starbucks grand indonesia” gave me zero result. I tried other keywords, “starbucks thamrin” hoping the search engine would show me list of all Starbucks Coffees at Jl. MH Thamrin, and unlike what I was hoping for, the search engine showed me zero result. Again.

That, is confusing.

Still, I was curious. I tried other keywords like “starbucks plaza senayan“, “starbucks senayan city“, “j.co senayan city”, “coffee bean pacific place” and all keywords gave me nothing. I thought those keywords are common ones and most people will likely use them to find their location.

Eventually I had to use “starbucks” and sorted through the search result one by one to find Starbucks Grand Indonesia venue. Not a pleasant experience.

I had similar experience with Kaskus. Their search engines are still not “sophisticated” enough to analyze keywords, and this caused search result to be quite irrelevant. It’s very hard to find contents at Kaskus and the content’s structure itself is still too wild and hard to manage.

At user generated websites like Kaskus and Koprol, internal search engine is very crucial for users’ content-discovery. Like Twitter that decided to buy Summarize to complement their microblogging service search structure. It’ll be better for Koprol and Kaskus to start investing at finding search engines, like Patrick Williamson said, it’s all about DISCOVERY.