A search engine by and for the federal government

[benced]

The new tech stuff the government has been putting out is legitimately fantastic. login.gov is probably my favorite sign-in experience, maybe slightly behind Google's (and considerably ahead of Apple or Microsoft's).

[vasco]

It's funny we expect governments stuff to be so bad that when they do something at the level of a regular SaaS our minds are blown.

[Mistletoe]

I remember on some radio show many years back a program where tech people were going back to government to make the tech better. They interviewed the guy that started it and it was really inspiring. I wish I could remember more details. These are true patriots.

[xalebf]

There’s a ton of interesting stuff at https://www.web.dma.mil/WEB-NextGen/

Just look at the significant links section

[jmartrican]

reminds me of Snow Crash, where the US federal government is reduced to a software entity.

[blackeyeblitzar]

Do they still force you to share your biometrics with a third party private service (Id.me)?

[mrmetanoia]

Yeah it's cool. Lately just feels like they're doing work, not all home runs, but they're out there swinging.

[aragonite]

https://data.gov is also worth mentioning

[caprock]

Here's the repo:

https://github.com/GSA/search-gov

[xalebf]

That’s so cool, I didn’t know the government had an open GitHub acct!

[neilv]

Why would a .gov Web site like this have dependencies on, and information leaks to, googletagmanager.com and crazyegg.com?

[darby_nine]

Maybe I'm dense but why would you expect a government service to not use common tooling available to them?

[Zigurd]

If you click through to sign up, there is a notice that it is for official use only (FOUO).

[yesbut]

The search results aren't very good

https://tinyurl.com/seargovresults

[ulrischa]

A cool thing. In Germany this would not be possible. EVB-IT Cloud contracts, DSGVO and other legal stuff slow down everything and costs are exploding. No inhouse ressources available double the trouble

[leononame]

I have s feeling GDPR is often used as an excuse in these cases while there is little evidence that it's actually slowing anything down. Especially for government: they do have the data alread and the GDPR applies to the dat itself, not whether you put a fancy frontend on it or not.

Government departments tend to be slow to adopt - again, based on feeling more than hard evidence - especially emin Germany. They'll just try to find some scapegoat for why they're failing, and GDPR is perfect. I've seen the same in businesses as well, where I've seen told numerous times they're behind schedule because of GDPR or they can't do this because of GDPR and it's just not true most of the time. People just like to hide their incompetence

I don't know anything about EVB-IT, so I'll shut up about that part

[ChrisArchitect]

Not new, 2010 maybe? But even more ingrained as part of government's 2023 Delivering A Digital-First Public Experience guidance to all agencies. https://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/briefing-room/2023/09/22/fact...

[georgeplusplus]

The gov usually contracts out its coding. Waa this made contractors under the federal gov or actual gov employees?

[britta]

The team is a mix of employees and contractors. They also offer customers (government agencies who use their service) the option to use Bing results or their in-house Elasticsearch results: https://search.gov/admin-center/content/content-overview.htm...

They do good work, and it’s an important service. I believe it saves a ton of money for the federal government by reducing reinvention of the wheel. As a former federal employee and current federal contractor, it’s been very helpful to be able to use their no-cost-to-customer search services on multiple projects. On my current project we eventually shifted to doing our own search (using Postgres full text search) so we could customize the indexing and ranking, but Search.gov was a useful interim solution.

[bydlocoder]

Russian Gosuslugi and Ukrainian Diya coming to US!

[kosolam]

I couldn’t find the search text field or button. ??

[edward]

My first search attempt return no hits.

"Sorry, no results found for 'Israel'. Try entering fewer or more general search terms."

https://find.search.gov/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&affiliate=usas...

[whoknowsidont]

That's because you're searching search.gov, not all government websites. Besides this being what it "obviously" is doing, the error message also states this plainly:

>Are you looking for information from across government? Please search again on USA.gov. Click the "Search again on USA.gov" link above the search button here, or use the link below to go to the main USA.gov website. Search.gov is a service powering the search boxes on government agencies' websites. You are currently searching the Search.gov website, and this website only contains information about our service.

[DominikPeters]

This search box only searches search.gov, so it's not surprising if there are no results for topics that are not about search engines. For "Israel" you can click the "Search again on USA.gov" tab.

[wslh]

France, Argentina, etc all produce the same result. It would had been a fast test to discover that.