TL;DR: It seemed to work for organizations which fit the appliance's assumptions > hyperlink based search ranking method of the day doesn't really work on rela

TL;DR: It seemed to work for organizations which fit the appliance's assumptions > hyperlink based search ranking method of the day doesn't really work on relatively small data holdings of an individual organization In my experience, it depends on what you mean by relatively small. Cloud editing and permissions aside, there seemed to be the 3 key factors: 1. Structure: hub-and-spoke sites interlinking crucial documents and pages 2. Culture: interdepartmental and personal rivalries which demand links as credit 3. Size: lots of employees creating and maintaining sites and content I was too young to understand it then, but all of these help an intranet's content resemble the web of the 90s and 2000s. That's the era Google's algorithm was designed for. The results weren't always perfect, but they were nearly always better than the alternatives. In-house or pre-existing alternatives tended to be awful, especially not having any search at all. Keep in mind, all of this was ~10 years ago. My memory isn't perfect and a lot of things have changed since then. I even made sure some of them did. It was my job at a few, but the relationships and boundaries between these were complicated. For convenience, let's say n_observed roughly equals 4.