Giuseppe Arcimboldo's 16th-century painting The Librarian, a portrait of a man composed entirely of books, with an open book splayed on top for hair, a bushy beard of dusters, and a red-bound volume for an arm, set against a blue-gray curtain. Giuseppe Arcimboldo, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

In the 90s, the way a number of us got online was with AOL, and there was a gold rush on something called AOL Keywords.

You name it, it had a keyword: Ford, MTV, Britney. The New York Times has a fun archived page showing all the keywords they used to have to allow people to jump to different parts of the newspaper at the time.

With the rise of search engines like Google, AOL Keywords gradually faded into irrelevance in the mid-to-late 2000s.

So you can imagine my astonishment when I walked into my first full-time job post-college in 2012 and discovered that they essentially had an in-house built version of AOL keywords, accessible from our intranet home page.1

They called this setup “Go Words,” and the interesting thing was that inside the enterprise, these still had some use, and they worked not only from the upper right text box on the intranet home page, but if you were on the corporate network (which, since we were in the office most of the time and if we weren’t we were on the VPN to get at anything those days), you could just type go/<keyword> into your browser’s address bar and it would take you directly to the thing you were interested in, like the HR system or any one of a number of internal-facing web properties for the company.

To me the DNS based approach of just typing into the address bar was the most useful way to leverage Go Words, since I didn’t even need to hit the intranet home page to click into and enter it.

Anyone could create one of these Go Words self-service, and it was awesome. It behaved to a degree like the company’s own link shortener; sure, cruft built up over time, and I’m sure someone, somewhere, at some point trotted out the old term “governance,” but in reality the cruft never really impacted anything—if a given go word wasn’t used anymore, or if the target link was long dead, it wouldn’t harm anything, and if someone claimed a go word that you wanted, you could talk to the developer of the tool and see about getting it moved, and whoever had the better semantic claim for the word tended to win out. So the person who wanted go/benefits to go to HR benefits instead of the other person’s desired page on discounts you could get at stores that the company worked with, and there would often be a discussion about just using a new go word like “discounts” and socializing that instead.

Granted, these were indeed simpler times, but I see many parallels to today—the search box on the intranet home page as well as every inch of that intranet home page is agonized over pixel by pixel, with different groups vying for the attention they feel they need with the requisite real estate they feel they should have.2

Much like how Google took over the world and AOL Keywords faded, in the enterprise various search solutions started showing up and co-opting the traditional keyword model (or other librarian indexed type models) of finding information.3

What this meant was, it was time to replace our traditional input box on the upper right of the intranet home page. The way it behaved up to that point was, if there was a go word hit, it would take you directly to that, but if there was no hit it would take you to traditional search results from our Google Search Appliance (which we were replacing with the better more permission-aware SharePoint Server Search). After this change, it would only take you to search, which had all the main words loaded as “best bets” with a suggested result starred on top when you input certain key terms/phrases, and you would have only the DNS-based go/<keyword> approach remaining.

To say some people were outraged would be an understatement. Many people had this box on the home page deep in their muscle memory and they missed their enterprise version of AOL Keywords, even though they could still do go/<whatever> in the address bar. And it wasn’t just the lifers at the company complaining—I distinctly remember being at a party with other new hires hearing someone complain behind me about how stupid it was that we were changing this. I bit my tongue at the time. Progress always has its detractors, and I’m sure this person is happily using their agent today without a care in the world for this ancient intranet tech.

Fast forward to now, and the intranet home page is still highly sought after by many teams for its real estate, but there’s a new intranet war I see brewing around semantics, that is, beyond owning an individual keyword, trying to own a concept so that agents in different places can find and provide your answers around your domain’s offerings which, due to the way the English language works in an imprecise way, all have a very great chance of overlapping with each other.

Picture the go/benefits fight again, but with agents. The HR team publishes content and/or an MCP server (often both!) that answers questions about benefits, and the team that negotiates store discounts publishes another whose description says it helps employees find their benefits, too. Someone asks the company’s assistant what benefits they get, and the semantic similarity (which may be a combination of lexical similarity and nearest neighbor matrix math based on the actual embeddings generated for the phrase) picks whichever description looks like the better match at that moment (because content changes), and depending on the phrasing and the way the LLM felt that day, it may not be the one it picked for the person sitting next to them. Nobody claimed a word, so there’s no collision anyone can see.

Ironically, the Go Words of yore were more precise than this, in a strange way—being a deterministic forward at least allowed for predictability in where you’d go and what you’d be shown. These traditional Go Words also worked because it was impossible to have the same word point to two different URLs, so when two individuals wanted it, they had no choice but to talk it out. It’s the same reason you can’t have two coffee shops across the street from each other with the same name.4

The war used to be over who got the word, and the wars were small ones. Now it’s over who gets the meaning, and due to the way these tools work, I expect it to be more difficult to work out than who wins the word…

And as with AOL Keywords that rode into the sunset, I expect that eventually we’ll all move beyond worrying about this issue to this extent. An interesting new angle to these new tools is not just how much we can do with them, but the extent to which we can customize them, and I fully anticipate individuals wanting to personalize their tools to their liking so that benefits does go to the discounts page, because to them, that makes more sense.

After all, the English language is imprecise and ambiguous.

Footnotes

  1. And everything was written in classic ASP. ↩

  2. As another example of this agonizing over the intranet home page of days past, our intranet home page way back when had a customizable world clock so when you loaded the intranet home it could show you multiple clocks. Me being the smart-aleck that I was at times, suggested: “Isn’t this built into Windows in the lower right corner with its clock? And with widgets on the desktop?” This was not met with great reception, and indeed a year or two later with various (at the time shelved) attempts to migrate the intranet home page to something more modern, ideally based on SharePoint publishing, ye ol’ requirements doc still had this ludicrous thing in it: “The solution shall be able to allow the user to configure a world clock.” It is, indeed, very hard for people to let certain things go. ↩

  3. I wrote about this a bit in a prior post. ↩

  4. Unless your name is Starbucks. ↩