Do You Speak Salesforce?
Have you ever tried to explain to someone what you do, only to find their eyes glaze over as if you were speaking a foreign language? It’s very possible that you were.
Every profession has its own language. I know when I first started working with marketers I couldn’t understand half of what they were saying. Terms like MQL, SAL, funnel and conversion made no sense. I knew what a funnel was, but obviously my understanding of the word had nothing to do with theirs.
As a developer I run into this all the time – the language I use when speaking to other developers can be incomprehensible to non-developers, even though all the words are English. In fact, this occurs to some degree in just about any profession or knowledge domain.
This poses quite a challenge when it comes to searching for information. A marketer searching for information on funnels isn’t interested in filtering liquids. A Salesforce admin searching for a formula isn’t trying to feed a baby. A search engine that searches the entire Internet can’t magically know what knowledge domain you are interested in, so you have to put in extra effort to craft your search query to tell the search engine to limit the results to those in that domain. This requires more effort and can produce mixed results, even after multiple attempts.
Salesforce, in particular, has numerous terms that overlap and change the meanings of ordinary words. Force, cloud, apex, formula, lead, contact, opportunity, trailhead … almost every sentence a Salesforce admin or developer would use contains words that mean something different depending on whether you are talking about Salesforce or something else. It’s enough to give any search engine, or searcher, a nervous breakdown.
Short of adding mind-reading capabilities to search engines, an obvious solution to this problem is to create a domain specific search engine. If you could, for example, tell Google to only search through sites that are known to focus on Salesforce content, you could provide Salesforce users, admins and developers with a search experience that is easier to use and one guaranteed to provide results that relate to Salesforce.
My new website, SearchTheForce.com, does exactly that. Leveraging a technology called “Google Custom Search”, SearchTheForce.com searches only through sites that are known to contain Salesforce related content. The site also supports a technology called Open Search – making it easy to perform searches directly from your browser’s search bar or URL bar without having to even visit the SearchTheForce.com website.
I think you’ll find it a much better way to search for Salesforce related content. After all, you speak Salesforce – shouldn’t you have a search engine that speaks Salesforce too?
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