Success factors for reinventing search include the following:
- Give up the wild goose chase.
Amassing new information daily while maintaining archival data, many federal sites have tried to keep up with content explosion with multiple search engines across multiple sites, databases and pages. This fragmented search is far from intuitive, making searching complicated, cumbersome and often unsuccessful. Agencies must integrate search functions with a federated search approach like the one that powers Science.gov, which brings together information from more than 50 databases and 2,100 websites from 13 federal agencies all in one place.
-
Know there’s no place like home.
Federal agencies have tremendous opportunities to change the game on customer service and improve citizen interaction by using geo IP—connecting people to local benefits offices, post offices, armed services recruitment centers and more.
-
Understand that search is the new homepage.
Next-generation search solutions have an intelligence layer and a context-based approach that can let them provide specific knowledge even before the search results appear. Just imagine the ease of typing in the word “tax” and getting an immediate display of the date that taxes are due this year or typing in “income” and getting median household income statistics for your state even before you hit return.
-
Deliver the needle in the haystack.
The recent addition of “Knowledge Graph” to Google’s search is taking context-based searching to the next level, providing traditionally unstructured data in an easily consumable format. Put to use by government websites, this kind of context-based search can enhance public information access and can help agencies meet expectations for using application programming interfaces to drive data accessibility.