Join the National Dialogue on Improving Federal Websites

On Monday, the U.S. Federal government kicked off a two week discussion about how they can best improve .gov web sites.

Here’s the thing. .gov web sites are an integral part of how Americans access government information and services. And the visibility of these sites in search engines such as Google and Bing is key to this access. A PEW Internet study from last year found that 82% of online American adults have accessed a government web site in the previous 12 months and 44% start at a major search engine when looking for government information. As I wrote about this before:

As they note in the report:

“As we found in our previous studies on this topic, search engines are frequently the first option when Americans need to find government information or services online. Fully 44% of those who could remember the last government website they visited found that site by conducting an online search. This is much higher than the percentage who visited a site they had used before (16% did this) or who relied on a friend or family member (14%), a government publication or notice (11%) or a general government website such as usa.gov (4%).”

Aaron Smith of Pew Internet & American Life, in an interview with O’Reilly’s Alex Howard said:

“When we asked this question previously in 2003, we found that search engines were far and away the number one way that folks were reaching their destinations,” said Smith. “We found almost exactly the same thing this time around. Sometimes they’ll go to a place that they saw in a notice or an email or a friend or a family member told them about. But, by and large, if they need to find information on their tax bill, they’ll search tax information or IRS in their search engine of choice and get to their destination that way. So that’s very much inline with what we’ve found in previous years and in other areas of online life as well, which is that the search is generally the default entry point to all sorts of information and other types of activities that people take part in.”

This behavior pattern underlines the need for government sites and others who provide government-related data to ensure they can be found in search engines to fully engage with the American public.

But the truth is that some .gov sites are cumbersome and hard to navigate. And there’s a lot of duplication and confusion. Also, there are a lot of sites. In June, President Obama signed an executive order on a Campaign to Cut Government Waste:

“As one of the campaign’s first steps, the Administration will be targeting duplication and waste among federal websites. There are almost 2,000 separate websites across the Federal Government. With so many separate sites, Americans often do not know where to turn for information. The Administration will immediately put a halt to the creation of new websites. The Administration will also shutdown or consolidate 25% of the 2000 sites over the next few months and set a goal of cutting the number of separate, stand alone sites in half over the next year.”

This is a monumental effort. Seriously. But the people involved are highly motivated.  A cross-functional task force has been working on ways to tackle the issue in a number of ways and has been tapping into the resources of experts across the country in usability, customer service, search, and the like. You can read more about this on the White House blog. I’ve been talking to them about things like:

• How can you improve the overall technical infrastructure of .gov web sites so that they can be more easily crawled and indexed?
• How can you look at content strategy from a task-focus to help identify areas to consolidate and expand?
• How can you built best practices/guidelines so that anyone working on a .gov can easily access the same learnings?

A foundation for this already exists at howto.gov, but it needs to be updated and expanded. In addition, the task force is building a specific plan of attack to both consolidate and improve .gov sites and develop long term best practices.

How You Can Help

I’m hosting a one hour “dialogue-a-thon” specifically about search tomorrow, Friday September 23rd at noon Eastern. In advance of that, I’ll be gathering together all of the ideas discussed so far so we can expand on those ideas and start talking about a plan of attack. I’d love for search experts to volunteer to help put together suggested best practices and guidelines around crawlable technical architecture, content strategy and consolidation, and organic search visibility. I’ll help lead that effort and make sure none of the ideas are overlooked.