Google has laid its eyes on US Government’s federal information. The US government has loads of data that are neither indexed nor made searchable. Currently no search engine is able to index millions of web pages belonging to the U.S government because they are blocked from getting indexed.
Accordint to Eric Schmidt, there is still plenty of data which are yet to be explored. Lot of information is not yet published and some information that is on websites are not findable by any search engines. With the new President, the online community is expecting that things would change. Many feel that Eric Schmidt who is considered to be an informal adviser to the new President-elect may be able to influence him and make the federal information more accessible.
A vast majority of the information are hidden from the public eyes. All the major search engine players including Google, Yahoo and Microsoft feel that making this information accessible online will increase the efficiency of the entire system and will help the people to a great extent. One of the strangest truths today is that if people look for some information online and if it is not available then for them the information does not exist anywhere else. People limit their knowledge these days more and more to the information found on the web.
The information that we are talking about are federal information which is meant to be accessible for public. As they don’t show up in search engine results, they virtually don’t exist for all practical purposes. It is rather surprising when we hear that most of the information are already in digital format. Therefore, it is not a question of conversion of data format. It is already available in the required format. It is just a matter of making it accessible. The important factor to be noted is that, people need to know where to look for the information they need for example if you want to know about EPA enforcement actions, you will find that information in the agency’s portal. If you want to know about Egyptian artifacts you can find that information in a search of the National Museum of Natural History and so on. The problem here is that people need to know where they should go to find the information they need. All the above resources and more such are not indexed as they are not made accessible to search engines. We are so used to finding the information that we need by Googling or by using other search engines. So we presume that if the information does not show up in search results it is probably not there. Sources indicate that there are over 1000 federal government websites, which are blocked from being indexed.
Already Microsoft is working with over 25 federal agencies in making their websites accessible to search engines. Soon we can expect changes in this direction more and more federal websites will be made more accessible through online searches.