U.S. Launches New FirstGov Search Engine

There is a new FirstGov search engine for the content from U.S. federal, state, local tribal and territorial sources.

Based on the Vivisimo dynamic clustering technology, the new FirstGov search appears to be a few lightyears ahead of the search technology used on the Government of Canada website.

Here is the search for hurricane relief. Some of the features of the new FirstGov:

• Results are organized dynamically along the left side of the browser window into "clusters" (with tabs for presenting results by topic, by type of material or by agency). The hundreds or thousands of results people tend to get in search engines are organized and classified into categories to help locate government information
• A "preview" feature included in each result snippet in the middle of the page allows the user to see what the full version of the corresponding page looks like
• Next to the search totals in the top middle is a link called "Details" that provides information on which government databases were searched and how many results came from each one
• Next to the URL for many of the results is a link reading "more from [name of the agency]" for running a site-specific search

There is also an advanced search page with added functionality (limits).