The perfect HR search

There is discussion going on at the moment about the Perfect Search, referring to the results provided by search engines such as Google, Yahoo and others. Most of this seems to have steemed from John Battelle asking the question "What is the Perfect Search" as he pens the final chapter in his new book.

Jeremy Zawodny has been talking about this for a few days and found a great video from Apple that simulates what the search world could be like. Jeremy mentions the idea of search engines "talking back", like a librarian would to try and help you find what you are looking for. echeslack mentions a cool search tool, Kartoo, that tries to graphically draw relationships. Tony Gentile offers an interesting point that the engine needs to be in sync with the user, which raises all sorts of other topics, and brings up the concept of "active listening", something I believe is shown in the video from Apple.

I would like to see this concept within HRIS tools to provide the perfect HR search. Imagine you want to go on leave/vacation open your browser and up pops your corporate portal. In the search box you enter "take leave next week" and an intelligent search agent goes off to work and provides the following results:-

• your current balances, highlighting accruals that are getting to the limit of organisational rules
• provides right policy based on who you are
• recommendation based on your previous records
• provides link to correct form
• summary of current approved leave among your peers
• even aggregate external content from travel sites, weather etc that might be relevant during your take off
• compare the time with your calendar, the project plans of any projects you are working on
  

I know some of this is done today by some software, but can we make it better?

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