ResearchBuzz

Did you know there was a Registry of US Government Publication Digtization Projects? Me neither. But there is, and you can both contribute your institutions projects and browse through the existing ones at http://www.gpoaccess.gov/legacy/registry/. There’s not a lot here, unfortunately, though I like what I do see.

You can do a simple keyword search with the site, or you can browse. I think I like the browsing page better; you can browse by project title, institution name, category of project, project status, and those projects which are searching for partners.

I browsed the “Natural Sciences & Mathematics” category and came up with eight listings including “Military Medical Periodicals” and “Southern Oregon Digital Archives”. Clicking on the View link takes you to an extensive information page including description, URL, administrative information, and technical information (file formats, etc.) Great stuff, I just wish there was more here.

In my review of Google’s revamped and relaunched government search, I noted with annoyance that you could not narrow your searches by state, and that Google had missed other opportunities to apply unique search options to a unique set of pages.

Being only one woman under one desk eating one peanut butter sandwich, there were limits to how much I could accomplish, but I did at least create a tool that allows you to narrow your Google government searches to all the 50 states and the District of Columbia. You can try it out at http://www.researchbuzz.org/wp/tools/googlestatesearch/.

When I put this together I had two options:

1) Track down the official site for every state and just add a site: syntax to the end of a query; 2) Rely on existing URL infrastructure and use inurl: syntax based on postal codes.

I went with #2.

For ages the standard for a state Web site was www.state.xx.us , where xx is a postal code. So for each state I tested an inurl: query using the state’s postal codes (inurl:wy for Wyoming, and so on.) For the most part this worked fine though there were a couple of cases where it absolutely didn’t (inurl:va got more Veteran’s Affairs than Virginia results). When it didn’t I tested alternatives (inurl:xx.us , inurl:xx.gov ) and picked the one that got the most and best results.

I also tested a search for inurl:statename, and found that got me a lot of relevant, state-centered results from national government agencies (radon maps from the EPA, for example, popped up over and over and over again.) So most of the state query modifiers ended up looking like this: ( inurl:xx | inurl:statename ).

Is this absolutely perfect? No; there’s still a little gunk in the searching. But it’s far easier to narrow your searches this way, if you’re looking for state-based information. Try it and see what you think. If you’re searching for social programs or benefits (food stamps, job training, etc.) try adding a city or county name to your query.

Google recently announced that they’ve launched a new site for government search. When I heard that my first thought was hey, didn’t they do that several years ago? Oh yeah! It was UncleSam, and it was available at http://www.google.com/unclesam .. but apparently that URL doesn’t exist anymore. Well, no matter. This new version not only offers searching mechanisms but personalized homepage modules, so let’s go explore. Google’s new government search is at http://usgov.google.com.

The first thing you’ll notice is that the front page is a lot like Google’s personalized home page. Only here you can put modules on your front page like White House press releases, the weather in Washington DC, and a feed from the Armed Forces Information Services. The site’s FAQ is available here; instead of offering searching across just .gov and .mil sites, as UncleSam did, this FAQ describes Google U.S. Government Search as searching “across U.S. federal, state and local government sites with domains such as .gov, .mil, and other select ones.”

I did a search for disability calculation and got about 791,000 results, about a tenth as many as running a general Google search. Domains on the first page of results spanned socialsecurity.gov, several state sites, and military sites. This is a place where sliders would come in really handy, to weigh your results more to state or federal sites, to military or civilian sites. There’s no way to easily sort from the results page, either (state sites first, fed sites first, etc.)

I went to the advanced search to see what kind of ways I could narrow down my search. I found the usual — domain, file format, language, usage rights (usage rights? When did that happen? I must have missed that.) Unfortunately I think Google missed an opportunity to add more value to their advanced search; I would have loved the opportunity to, say, limit results by state, or weigh results from military results higher than civilian results, or limit results only to pages from federal sites. And so on. The advanced search is not very different from the regular Web search advanced search and doesn’t add much value to the uniqueness of the government search content. One more annoyance: go to the government search page and run a search. Then click on the big red-white-and-blue Google logo. Do you go back to the government search home page? No! You go back to Google’s regular Web search page. Wubba?

I like the government-oriented home page possibilities, but there’s just so much more that could have been done with the search elements. I’m disappointed.