Google Goes Government

Google has launched a new Web site devoted to searching anything related to the federal government. As first reported by the Washington Post, the site targets federal employees as well as citizens. From our perspective, it was rather nice to see that daily headlines from Government Executive are among those included by default on the new page.

The folks at Google say the site isn't supposed to compete with the current king of the government search sites, FirstGov, but complement it. GSA recently launched a souped-up FirstGov search engine, at a cost of $18 million over five years. The FirstGov search technology is provided by Google competitor Microsoft and Internet search company Vivisimo.--Daniel Pulliam