When representatives of Uncle Sam say, “Don’t worry, we’re here to help,” some choose to start worrying instead. For once it’s ok to relax.

The heavily revamped FirstGov portal, resplendent with clustering search technology from Vivisimo and an assortment of information from various parts of the US government.

One of the links leads to the various gift options available from federal agencies. While you can’t ask for a break on your income taxes, you can pick up items like a DeWitt Clinton Train Set from the Smithsonian, or a crystal gavel available from the Supreme Court’s gift shop.

Folks with family members or friends serving in the nation’s Armed Forces can click over to the America Supports You website from FirstGov. A selection of links there offers opportunities to help troops in and out of theatre, as well as their families.

Closer to home, people who have seriously procrastinated with their greeting card and package shipping can find more information, including shipping deadlines, at the Post Office website. There you’ll find that you’ve missed the December 18th First Class mailing deadline, which means you’ll have to send wealthy Aunt Edna her card tomorrow by Priority Mail unless you want to get cut out of the will.

The end of year holidays have always been a hectic time for traveling. An assortment of travel tips for domestic and international vacationers advise people on the latest news regarding air travel and border crossings, among other topics.

Other areas of interest like cooking and shopping receive some attention at FirstGov. The sheer volume of information accumulated by the numerous federal agencies and made available through the portal merits attention from Internet-using citizens. By virtue of being online, a lot of resources that may have required a lot of time and phone calls to find in the past should be much easier to locate today.

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David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.

Searching For Patents The Google Way

The government always seems to make the process of getting from point A to point B a more difficult undertaking than Hannibal taking elephants through the Alps. Not to mention how they welcome their taxpaying visitors with as much enthusiasm as the Romans had for the arriving Carthaginians.

There has been some improvement on a general level with the relaunch of the portal FirstGov, which uses Vivisimo’s clustering technology to help people find what they need from among the voluminous stores of government data. It didn’t help with the patent search though.

Google has stepped up to make patent search a friendlier process. It is a beta product, with features like saving and printing patents planned for a later release.

A post on Google’s Official blog by software engineer Doug Banks noted how Patent Search functions like another Google product:

The search works best by querying for general concepts. Google gives some examples on the main patent search page, one of which is for “litter box.”

Clicking that brings up the patent summary, any accompanying drawings, and a list of other patents that reference the one being viewed. There is also a link to view the patent at the USPTO website.

The litter box patent example is for people in cars, and not cats. And it’s an under-the-seat trash can, not a substitute for a rest area on the interstate.

Google’s new search indexes over seven million patents. They note in a FAQ how recent patents issued in the past few months may not be in the index yet. Also, they only index patents, not patent applications like this one on Information Retrieval Based on Historical Data.

Can you guess the company that submitted that application?

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In its 7th annual report on State and Federal E-Government in the United States, Brown University dubbed FirstGov tops among the 51 federal sites it analyzed. The General Services Administration announced the choice in a statement today.

Brown’s Taubman Center for Public Policy ranked federal sites on features such as online publications, databases, audio and video clips, foreign languages or translation, disability access, privacy and security policy, digital signatures, PDA accessibility, readability and the number of online services.

“This report is a testament to all the hard work that the FirstGov.gov team and the GSA Office of Citizen Services and Communications have done in making FirstGov.gov a world-class site,” said GSA Administrator Lurita Doan. “I urge all citizens to log on to FirstGov.gov today and experience for themselves how easy it can be to find the helpful, official government information they need online.”

FirstGov has been working on updating its search technology for quite a while. In 2005, Vivisimo, which makes the Clusty metasearch engine, and Microsoft’s MSN Search won contracts to provide search services to FirstGov.

The result of their work can be seen in queries performed on the FirstGov site. A search returns categories clustered by Vivisimo’s technology on the left side of the page, and MSN Search results based on those categories. It’s fast and relevant, no small feat considering the mountains of information one associates with the federal government.

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The US Government Appearing In Syndication

The federal government has slowly begun the painful shift to a more effective electronic means of doing its work. One site that has been the open side for citizen access to government information, FirstGov, announced the addition of RSS feeds and email updates on topics it covers.

FirstGov offers two RSS feeds, one on updates to government news and information, the other focusing on the most popular questions asked of the government. The site noted in a statement the latter feed will be updated multiple times each week, with monthly themes related to topics like taxes and back-to-school being highlighted.

Also, FirstGov wisely made updates to thirty-three of its most popular pages available via email. The majority of Internet users have not broadly embraced RSS. FirstGov inadvertently demonstrated the biggest hurdle to RSS adoption, by making what should be a simple subscription to RSS feeds more difficult.

Current stable versions of Firefox and Opera web browsers can automatically detect if a feed is available for a site, and provide an icon in the address bar for users to add it to Live Bookmarks (Firefox) or Feeds (Opera).

Neither browser detected FirstGov’s feeds. Only by visiting the bottom left of FirstGov’s page for a link to the feeds page can one find links to a page with the feeds. Opera recognizes a FirstGov RSS feed link when it is clicked and offers an option to add it to feeds, while the more widely used Firefox doesn’t even see it as something it can Live Bookmark.

Hopefully the FirstGov team can fix this shortly, now that work on enhancing the site’s search engine with help from MSN Search and Vivisimo has been completed.

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FirstGov.gov? Sounds like the Department of Redundancy Department named the site. Putting the jokes aside, Vivisimo and its contractor-partner, Microsoft, managed to integrate their respective search tools into a single search point of presence for the FirstGov website, GCN reported.

Vivisimo brought its clustering know-how to the table, while Microsoft contributed search expertise. Together, they have rebuilt FirstGov’s search engine into a site that indexes 40 million pages now compared to 8 million in its previous iteration.

Users of Vivisimo’s Clusty search site will recognize the familiar clustered results on the left side of the search result page. A quick test query for “fine arts grants” brought back 119 results, sorted into a list of sites like the federal NEA, state results from Virginia and Ohio, and even some results from the official site of the Chickasaw Nation.

GCN commented in its report about some of the features available on FirstGov:

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FirstGov.gov, a web site focused on delivering government information to the public, has a new top-three list of Internet search engines eligible to compete for federal task orders through September of 2010. Gigablast, Vivisimo, and Norwegian-based FAST Search and Transfer received the news from the General Services Administration.

Gigablast congratulated Vivisimo, a longtime Gigablast client, in a statement today. Vivisimo, working with MSN Search, won the first task order awarded. That task order will see Vivisimo and MSN provide enhanced search results for the FirstGov web portal.

In the new arrangement, Vivisimo will use MSN Search Web Service to pull results from government documents in its index. Further, filtering operators supported by MSN Search will help users better query for documents. Vivisimo will use its Velocity software and Clusty search service to cluster MSN and Vivisimo government search results.

“Together with Microsoft, we will build the finest government search portal the world has seen, helping citizens learn and profit from the rich information offered across thousands of government Web sites,” said Raul Valdes-Perez, CEO and co-founder of Vivsimo, in a statement today.

David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business. Email him here.

Need to find something about the IRS, your elected officials, the military? Google Uncle Sam makes it easier than a general search.

The funny thing is, Google does not mention it anywhere on their help or labs pages; you’ll only see a link to it at the very bottom of their Advanced Search page. Even when you get there, there’s not a word on what it does and what it searches. Interesting.

So, how good is this search engine? In preparing to write something up on it, I searched around the internet looking for information. I was lucky to come across the very well-researched, useful and recently written article, Why Google Uncle Sam?, by Peggy Garvin. She must know what she’s talking about as she is author of The United States Government Internet Manual.

After reading her article, I realized that there was no sense writing one myself as she covered the subject so well. She discusses the advantages and disadvantages of Google Uncle Sam and compares it to the other major government search engine, FirstGov. Her conclusions are thatwell, I suppose you should read the story since she wrote it. I can say she finds the good and bad in each and she recommends you use both.

If you do any searches for government information at all, I highly recommend you read her article and try both government search engines.

Mark Fleming is the founder of a new blog called Google Tutor & Advisor. Google Tutor & Advisor offers in-depth Tips, Techniques and Advice for Google Users.

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