The FirstGov information website serves as the US Government’s official portal on the Internet, and Brown University recognized it as the top-ranked federal site.
Brown’s Taubman Center for Public Policy ranked federal sites on features such as online publications, databases, audio and video clips, foreign languages or translation, disability access, privacy and security policy, digital signatures, PDA accessibility, readability and the number of online services.
“This report is a testament to all the hard work that the FirstGov.gov team and the GSA Office of Citizen Services and Communications have done in making FirstGov.gov a world-class site,” said GSA Administrator Lurita Doan. “I urge all citizens to log on to FirstGov.gov today and experience for themselves how easy it can be to find the helpful, official government information they need online.”
FirstGov has been working on updating its search technology for quite a while. In 2005, Vivisimo, which makes the Clusty metasearch engine, and Microsoft’s MSN Search won contracts to provide search services to FirstGov.
The result of their work can be seen in queries performed on the FirstGov site. A search returns categories clustered by Vivisimo’s technology on the left side of the page, and MSN Search results based on those categories. It’s fast and relevant, no small feat considering the mountains of information one associates with the federal government.
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David Utter is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business.
