Open databases, US government told
p2pnet news | Freedom:- Google and Wikipedia want the US Congress to require federal agencies to make their web sites, records and databases more searchable.
Company representatives made these desires known to the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs, says the Mercury News.
“It could be unintentional oversight or incompetence,” it has Ari Schwartz, deputy director for the Center for Democracy and Technology, saying.
The CDT will release a report with OMB Watch which shows, “basic government information often does not show up in search results provided by search engines run by Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Ask.com,” says the story.
The hearing comes nearly five years after the E-Government Act first required government agencies to make information more accessible electronically. The law is scheduled to be reauthorized soon, adds the Mercury News.
Government databases are treasure troves of random data, “but locating much of their content via search engines like Google is often a fruitless endeavor because of a failure to link this data to commonly used search engines, experts told a Senate panel Tuesday,” says PC Magazine.
The likes USA.gov, the official US Web portal, “allow users to search within the site for pertinent information, as do countless other agency Web sites” but, “Their content, however, is not always accessible via search engines, making it difficult for the average Web user to find data hidden in government databases,” it states.
Also See:
Mercury News – Google presses government to make records more searchable, December 11, 2007
PC Magazine – Panel Suggests Ways to Index Government Documents, December 11, 2007
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