The GCloud initiative and the associated CloudStore are a great idea – hoping to level the field of UK government IT supply, take advantage of flexible and agile delivery of software and services and help SMEs like ourselves compete against the large System Integrators (SIs) that dominate this market. GCloud sales have now reached £154m although this is still a fraction of what the UK government spends on IT. We’re on GCloud 5 ourselves by the way so I have a vested interest in helping potential customers find us, and we’ve helped with government systems before.
Unfortunately the Cloudstore itself has a search facility that is badly broken. There are several obvious issues: many of the entries created by the larger suppliers have been keyword stuffed – here’s a particularly egregious example from Atos which seems to include most of the terms used in software in the last few years. I found this using the search terms ‘enterprise search’ which produces very few relevant looking results. The online guidance for CloudStore search suggests putting double quotes around my terms (sadly I think few users will think of this) which improves things a little but there are still a lot of irrelevant results – an online conferencing system is fifth for example.
Fortunately all is not lost and in the next iteration of GCloud we are promised major improvements to the search engine. I’m hoping this will include phrase boosting. However, if the big SIs and others are allowed to create the sort of bad-quality content I have shown above, no search engine in the world will be able to sort the wheat from the chaff. It is essential that CloudStore entries are subject to some kind of curation and that keyword stuffing is banned and/or heavily penalised, otherwise SMEs like ourselves will still find it very hard to compete with the big SIs.
Update: it seems there is a new system under construction, and the search works a lot better. Let’s hope it comes out of alpha soon and can be used by purchasers!
