Google and Government Content
September 19, 2008
In the furor over Google’s growing share of the search market and the GOOG’s decision to move forward with its Yahoo ad deal, I can’t fault anyone for overlooking this Federal Computer Week article. “The Search Mandate” by FCW’s John S. Monroe is a brief but important comment about Google. You can read the September 15, 2008, item here. Google, according to Mr. Monroe, does a better job of indexing US government information than the US government. For those unaware of the Government Information Locator Service or GILS, this 1994 initiative was supposed to market it easy to find US government information. The National Institutes of Standards and Technology (NIST) is killing the program. The reason is that Google and other commercial search engines do a better job than the US government. For most people, the idea that a service like Google’s government search here or the Microsoft-Vivisimo service here or even the little known Yahoo service available by limiting the query to the Dot Gov domain here are better than the Federal government’s home grown GILS is obvious.
For me, this announcement triggered several thoughts. I want to outline these so I don’t have them slip away, and you may want to comment on my opinion about this GILS dead end.
- The scope of the Google government index, based on my test queries, seems broader than the indexes of either Yahoo or Microsoft-Vivisimo. Even queries run on the Department of Energy Web site, indexed by a third party engine, perform less well for me than the same queries run on Google’s government index. Try it yourself. Among my test queries were “ECCS”, “nuclear fuel pool”, and “SWU”. Let me know what you find out.
- The bread and butter of high end professional information services is indexing content from various courts, government agencies, and related sources such as routine documentation about specific programs. Companies generating revenue by indexing public information and adding metadata include LexisNexis (a British Dutch outfit) and Thomson Reuters (Canadian and American). These outfits could witness an increasing erosion of their revenue as knowledge about the usefulness of ad supported or free search services’ ability to offer the same data without the big price tag.
- Useful tools such as those available from Yahoo, for example, make it easy for savvy developers to integrate government information with other services. These mash ups may create more useful ways to look at Economic Research Service data, the reports available from the Department of Commerce, and procurement needs of local, country, state, and Federal entities. Such services would have broader ripple effects than making it easier and cheaper for an attorney to locate a court document.
I have not figured out how important or unimportant the GILS decision is. My hunch is that unless Microsoft and Yahoo can do a better job of indexing US government information, Google may well dominate this information sector as it now dominates Web search. With advertisers and newspapers pawing the ground about the Google Yahoo deal, perhaps some folks smarter than I might want to consider the implications of Google being the primary way to locate government data. A server glitch in such circumstances might make it tough for government workers or citizens to find what they are seeking. The Library of Congress, the individual executive agencies, and various quasi-government organizations seem unable to make their content available and searchable in a comprehensive and timely way. There may be enough Federal employees to print out documents and go through them by hand. A fine kettle of fish is that scenario.
Stephen Arnold, September 20, 2008
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2 Responses to “Google and Government Content”
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Hi Stephen —
Actually, just to clarify, I didn’t say Google does a better job than GILS — I said that Google (and other commercial search engines) appear to be what people prefer using. In fact, search experts I consulted say government sites often get buried in the search results. My point was that if Google (or whatever) is the way the world is going, agencies better become Google experts.
John
– It works in the US government. Alternatively, apply September 15 , 2008 , I will be sharing basically for My point. Unlike Google, simulated results do not represent other services.