There's so much good stuff in this post by Christian Buckley. It's about enterprise collaboration, but his points apply to issues of findability generally. The central idea that sticks out to me: context is key to findability, and social interactions are great sources of contextual cues. As Buckley points out, though, context is mostly missing from modern search and navigation.
I also love this comment from Steven Flinn summing up the different modes of finding:
- Follow — when you are aware of sources of generally relevant information
- Search — when you are aware that you have a need for some information now, but don’t know where it is
- Discovery (i.e., recommendations) — when you have a need for some information now, but are not even aware you need it and/or that it exists.