Search is very important - for Google, the Government, you and me

Note this recent Senate hearing on "E-Government 2.0: Improving Innovation, Collaboration, and Access" - it seems Google's discovered that you can't find much useful information via search on government websites....no kidding.

Not only that, but there's not much "Government 2.0" in practice altogether...In the very near future, it’s highly likely that a predominance of State, Local and Federal eGovernment service providers will seek additional routes to inclusionary accessibility by turning to already common web-enabled social interaction methods (like Sphinn!). Some are already taking tentative steps in the public eye; many more are carefully enabling proliferation of such tools within the Intranets, "inside the Firewall". Focusing specifically on the citizen web-enabling efforts of the United States beginning in 2001 with the Office of Management and Budget’s 24 “Egovernment Initiatives”, many of these efforts can demonstrate maturity and success in terms of increased citizen participation, leverage of the Internet and adherence to ADA principles outlined in Section 508 guidance. The US Postal Service, the IRS, and the Department of Agriculture are examples of Federal Agencies that can point to objectives met regarding satisfied constituents and cost-effective, web-enabled IT investments. Some agencies actually are proclaiming "Web 2.0" capabilities, like NASA (which uses Google's own Custom Search Engine technology, thereby enabling "results almost identical to the unsponsored links you'll get from Google's public web site").

Future administrations will likely continue this trend; for example 2008 Presidential Candidate Barak Obama intends to employ “technologies, including blogs, wikis and social networking tools, to modernize internal,cross-agency, and public communication and information sharing to improve government decisionmaking.”

Just wait till Google's unleashed on the campaign and PAC sites.