Government Computer News
Web sites get results-oriented
Agencies are working with Google to boost rankings and increase traffic
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Image: Rick Steele
PRIMO FINDS: NIH’s Dennis Rodrigues says the goal is to boost the quality of search results rather than the quantity.
Only 4 percent of visitors to www.nih.gov, for instance, got there by typing the URL into their browser’s address line, according to a ComScore research study released last year. The rest arrived by typing nih.gov into a search engine — usually Google’s — and then clicking on the results.
This has set up an interesting dynamic between search engine companies and the federal government. The feds want their sites to appear high on the list of results delivered. Google, Yahoo and the other search engines want to have satisfied searchers. The more content that is searchable, the better, and the happier everybody is.
Users performing a search think, “ ‘I’ve been diagnosed with cancer, and I need information.’ They don’t think about their information sources,” said J.L. Needham, who represents Google’s public sector content partnership. “But if people can’t find something, they blame it on Google, not the government.”
To boost their rankings on search lists, agencies have been working with Google to develop sitemaps, which are Extensible Markup Language-based lists of Web addresses that point to database records.
A sitemap can take a couple of forms, Needham said. At its simplest, it can be a list of URLs submitted through Google’s Webmaster Tools Web site at www.google. com/webmasters/ tools.
Much of the government’s information on the Web is uncrawlable, Needham said.
“Some estimates are that as much as 90 percent of government information is not accessible through Web search engines,” embedded in databases. “We estimate that at about 50 percent,” Needham said. A sitemap makes this information visible to the search engines.
Opting in
But does this request for sitemaps put Google in the tricky position of telling the federal government what to do?
No, said Chris Sherman, who is the executive editor of Searchengineland.com. “It’s voluntary. Web sites don’t have to do it,” he said. “I don’t think any of the search engines are dictating anything. Their concern is to get as much content as they can. As good as search engines have become, there are still some barriers.”
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