Content Matters

Google today announced the (re)launch of Google U.S. Government Search, an updated version of their vertical search of federal government websites.

The Google Government search has actually been around for at least five years, though it was not heavily promoted.

The updated site indexes content from federal, state and local government sites - basically it's the subset of the Google index from .gov or .mil domains, along with some hand-picked sites from .com, .us and .edu domains.

Users can submit searches as they would on Google, but results will be targeted to those from government sites.  For example, looking for information on John Wood, who serves as Chief of Staff at the Department of Homeland Security, I first used the standard Google search.  It returned 289 million pages, led by John Wood Community College and John Wood Water Heaters.  The DHS Chief of Staff was nowhere to be found among the first few results pages.  The same search on Google Government yielded 3.5 million pages, with the DHS John Wood right at the top.

Google's relaunch of this site was timed to tout the hiring of Mike Bradshaw as head of federal sales.  Clearly, Google is looking to sell its Google appliance more heavily in the federal markets and hopes that as users find Google useful for searching their extranets, they will want to use Google for their internal file access as well.

For publishers serving vertical markets, this should serve as a reminder of how compelling vertical search can be.  Leveraging their domain expertise and the skills of database editors, content providers are uniquely situated to create useful vertical search solutions to drive traffic to their sites for advertising or to drive transactions.

While Google's U.S. Government Search helps improve search results, a publisher focused on the government space could take it even further, providing search by level (Federal, State or local), department or agency or even individual states or localities.

Update: An interesting comment from Outsell's Chuck Richard, who notes that "the SERPs are already populated with AdWords ads from information companies such as BidNet, Onvia, GovernmentBids, BidLink, and many more. This drives home once again that what on the surface looks competitive to information companies in the government space is being used by them to steer traffic back to their professional-quality, finely matched content."  While these AdWords bids were purchased for Google (and not specifically for Google U.S. Government Search), it's clear that they will benefit from the positioning.