Is a more searchable federal web around the corner?

Is it time for the federal government to bite the bullet, and get a better system that would make millions of its web pages more accessible? It might be way overdue, actually. A wide array of public information is largely invisible to search engines, and thus to the general public. And the public cannot get to the web pages that are hidden in federal government databases.

The treasure trove of government information is so complicated to search that engines powered by Yahoo, Google and Microsoft can't find it or index it, according to a recent article in the Washington Post.

"The vast majority of information is still not searchable or findable either because it's not published or it's on websites which the government has put up, which no one can index," Google chief executive Eric Schmidt said during a recent presentation at the New American Foundation. The system is such a mess that it is sometimes impossible to find specific Environmental Protection Agency enforcement actions involving a specific company. You can't search by name for the details of a Vietnam War causality, and you can't find a picture of a specific ancient Egyptian artifact housed at the Smithsonian.

"Unfortunately, too much of the public information provided on government websites just doesn't show up when the average American does a Google search," said J.L. Needham, Google's manager of public-sector content partnerships. "As a result, information that is intended for the public's use is effectively invisible."

Plenty of government information, although it's public, can't be accessed unless the user fills out an online form. And until they do, that means the search engines' crawlers generally can't look in databases.

So just what should the government be doing? Try fixing it.

For more on building a searchable federal web:
- check out this Washington Post article