Panelists: Many gov't Web sites hard to navigate

PANELISTS: MOST GOV'T WEB SITES HARD TO NAVIGATE
[SOURCE: InfoWorld, AUTHOR: Grant Gross]
Five years after the U.S. Congress passed legislation to improve electronic access to government information, 2,000 government Web sites contain public information that cannot be accessed through outside search engines, e-government experts said Tuesday. The U.S. government has improved e-government services since 2002, but it still has a lot of work to do, representatives of Google, Wikipedia, and the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT) told a congressional committee. "Today, too much public information is effectively unavailable to the average American," said John Lewis Needham, Google's manager of public sector content partnerships. "It can't even be found in the federal government's own search engine, USA.gov." Many government Web sites use technologies, including search forms, that cannot be indexed by search engines, Needham told the U.S. Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. About 80 percent of the time, U.S. residents don't first look for information on government Web sites, but through search engines, he said. CDT and government watchdog group OMB Watch released a report Tuesday, detailing how government Web sites prevent search engines from crawling through their information.
http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/12/11/Many-government-Web-sites-hard-to-navigate_1.html

* CDT and OMB Watch today jointly released "Hiding in Plain Sight," a report highlighting a critical gap in online access to vital government information. The report, presented to a Senate panel today, exposes a simple technological roadblock as the culprit and notes the problem has an equally simple technological fix. The problem comes to light as the E-Government Act of 2002, which promotes access to government information and services, is up for reauthorization. December 11, 2007

Hiding in Plain Sight [PDF], December 11, 2007:
http://www.cdt.org/righttoknow/search/

* Testimony -- Ari Schwartz [PDF], December 11, 2007:
http://www.cdt.org/testimony/Schwartz_egov_Testimony_20071211.pdf

* Press Release -- Hiding in Plain Sight Report, December 11, 2007:
http://www.cdt.org/press/20071211press.php