Experts: government data unseen online.

• Author: Swartz, Nikki
• Position: UP FRONT: News, Trends & Analysis

During a December U.S. Senate panel, experts urged lawmakers to make the content of government databases more accessible to the public by linking them to mainstream search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft.

Currently, government websites such as USA.gov enable online users to search within the site for specific information, but their content is not always accessible via search engines, making the information in government databases hard to find. For example, a Google search for "small farm loans" brings up commercial offers for loans and government loan statistics, but does not include data on federal government programs designed to help fund small farmers, Ari Schwartz, deputy director of the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT), told the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs. Similarly, a search for "New York radiation" does not find basic FEMA and Department of Homeland Security information about current conditions and monitoring.

"Unquestionably, the E-Government Act has changed the way that the public interacts with the government," Schwartz said. "Unfortunately, despite the availability of an easy technological fix, many key governmental information sources remain 'hidden in plain sight,' from the very search engines that the public is most likely to use."

In December, CDT and OMB (Office of Management and Budget) Watch released a joint report on the availability of government data on commercial search engines. "Hiding in Plain Sight: Why Important Government Information Cannot Be Found Through Commercial Search Engines," (www.cdt. org/righttoknow/search/Searchability.pdf) reveals that vital government information seems "invisible" to millions of Americans who are combing the Internet and looking for answers via the most popular search engines. According to the report: "Many federal agencies operate websites that are simply not configured to enable access through popular search engines. These websites don't allow search engines to 'crawl' them, an industry term for indexing online content, and sometimes even block sites from being found by search engines."

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Part of the problem is the sheer volume of data produced by the government, said John Lewis Needham, manager of public sector content partnerships at Google, who told the committee of data...