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GCN Home > 12/11/06 issue

Stocking stuffers

The battle of government search

By Joab Jackson and William Jackson, GCN Staff

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Government information became a hot commodity this year. In January, the General Services Administration relaunched FirstGov.gov, the official government search site, after hearing endless groans about the older system.

The agency used Vivisimo Inc.’s clustering technology and Microsoft Corp.’s MSN search tool. “When FirstGov got started, we crawled, but as more and more agencies put information on the Web, we had to provide more service, and we had to scale to manage this,” said Mary Joy Pizzella, former associate administrator of GSA’s Office of Citizen Services and Communications, who left in June for Google Inc.

Coincidentally, Google relaunched its own government-specific search site, Google U.S. Government Search, which carves out all the .mil and .gov sites from its voluminous index of the Web.

In the fall, Google representatives started visiting agencies asking them to index their database content, so it could also be retrievable through the search engine. The good news is that while the search giants duke it out over which gets to be the premier gateway to government information, agencies themselves can benefit from the new technology such a battle inevitably brings about.

Vivisimo, for instance, has updated its Velocity 5.0 enterprise search software, based on the work it has done with GSA. It features visualization, document aggregation and the ability to connect different types of documents.
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