14 DAY TRIAL // What's the solution if you have a specific inquiry about some government information that is supposed to be publicly available? You type in the exact URL of the site the information is on? Not likely, I doubt that government sites are the first thing on your mind every morning when you get out of bed, and if they are? why? I can't find a reasonable explanation for that.
Here's the most obvious solution: you're going to use a search engine, and by the statistics you'll probably use Google for the job and the Mountain View based company has decided to help you if that is indeed your case.
Liz Eraker, Policy Analyst at Google's Public Policy Blog commented on the issue: "Google has been working to make publicly available government information more accessible to the public. We're doing so by helping government agencies implement the Sitemap Protocol, a technical standard that makes it easier for search engines to crawl and index pages on a website. Tomorrow, a Senate committee will take another important step toward addressing this problem."
The reason this amount of extensive work is needed to be done is that at the moment, any search for such information is bound to give you a surprisingly weird result and a very little relevant one at that as well. By Google's statistics, about half of the content the government agencies make available on the web doesn't appear in search results because of the way many government websites are structured.
"Implementing Sitemaps is an easy way for government agencies to make their online information and services more visible and accessible to the citizens they serve. We've already worked with states like Arizona, California, and Virginia, and federal agencies in the Departments of Agriculture, Energy and Health and Human Services. We've also supported the site mapping of large databases by Library of Congress and National Archives and Records Administration", says Eraker and she continues by expressing her hope that the Senate and governments at all levels will participate in Google's current effort to become more transparent and accessible to citizens.