The other day when I heard someone complaining about our Google Search Appliance's performance, I realized that the problem they were describing wasn't caused by the search engine, but by the large amounts of outdated content out there on our website. There are so many old pages out there that are cluttering up our search results because they have been forgotten and abandoned. And we know from that great usability study that Tammy Allgood conducted, that our students aren't even going to the next page of search results.

I'll have to admit, I'm probably more guilty than most. You know how it is. We are all concentrating and these huge projects: and all the things we need to build/create as well as the huge beast that needs to be fed (the web is always hungry for content and updates). Who has time to clean up old stuff? But I just wanted to send a little shout-out to the web community and say...

...let's get together and clean house.

I live with five daughters (and one very patient man) and we have found the best way to clean our house is get together once a week, turn on some loud music, and all work together--something we affectionately call the "dust storm." Not only does the job get done faster, but its almost enjoyable to work together to improve the space we all share.

So what if we instituted a web community "dust storm?"

Like every Friday (or every other Friday) take an hour and all clean out old files. We could make it fun... like all send in the number pages that were deleted, and who ever had the most would get free coffee from Henry (you'd buy us coffee, right Henry?) Heck, I'd buy you coffee.

I did try this myself last friday before I went home (thought I should actually practice it before I suggest it). I only got through two directories because before I started deleting pages, I went through the last four months of stats to see if anyone was still hitting those pages (in case I needed to redirect anything).

I'm almost ashamed to admit this... but after an hour I had cleaned out 480 pages.... You don't realize how much old stuff is out there until you start going through every directory. But it felt good to walk into the weekend knowing asu.edu was a little lighter.

So what do you say? You wanna dust storm?