Science.Gov Launched

Science.gov ( http://www.science.gov ) has been launched as a gateway to information about science and technology from federal government organizations.

The site is set up like a searchable subject index. From the front page you can browse categories including Agriculture & Food, Math, Physics, & Chemistry, and Science Education. Choose a category and you'll be taken to a list of subcategories (only they're called "Narrower Topics" and an alphabetical list of sites. Annotation is good and includes the department where the site comes from (so that the description looks like this: "Database of USGS Biological Resources' research projects [Department of the Interior, U.S. Geological Survey (USGS)]") Please, Science.Gov, space out the listings a little bit more so they're easier to read.

Searching is interesting. Use the keyword search at the top of the page and you'll get a list of over two dozen sites you can search for your keyword. You can search up to ten of the sites at a time. Searching all available Science.Gov documents is selected as default.

I don't know if they're using some other search tech, or if it's the smaller data set, but I like the search results I'm getting for this one much better than I liked the FirstGov results. The search engine took everything I threw at it and came up with consistently relevant results. Most documents are HTML; PDF documents are marked with a PDF icon.

You can view the results in one of two ways. You can click on the title of the page and get taken directly to it, or you can click several checkboxes, choose "List Marks" from the top of the page, and then choose "Display." All the pages you chose will be listed at the same time in one long page.

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