Tech Shout!

On Thursday, Google launched an exclusive U.S. government search set up, with the help of the company’s customised homepage platform. The site allows users to quickly search for IRS forms, locate a DMV Web site and find phone numbers to local government offices. The latest Government-related news is also displayed.

“It’s a site on which you can 1) search across a huge index of U.S. Federal, state and local government websites via a single search box, and 2) stay up to date through personalized content feeds from government agencies and press outlets,” said Google product manager Kevin Gough.

FirstGov.gov, the U.S. government’s official Web portal, also offers a search engine, but Google’s search engine is rather directory of government agencies and topics. It is divided into four main categories: “For Citizens,” “For Business and Nonprofits,” “Government to Government” and “Federal Employees.” We can also find a Spanish language version.

People who use Google’s U.S. government site can restrict searches to government sites, and the results point to specific pages within those sites, not just to a home page of the appropriate government agency.

“We are not trying to compete with FirstGov in any way,” said Kevin Gough. “We actually think they are complementary offerings. Firstgov has a directory structure. Google U.S. Government Search focuses on Google’s core strength, which is search. The government has a lot of rich content, but people don’t know necessarily where to look. Google has a large user base,” Gough said. “We hope that this motivates [agency] Web masters to expose more of their info via RSS. We are going to ask them to format their content in a way that can be easily accessed by Google users.”