FirstGov.gov, the official Web portal of the U.S. government, announced Friday that it will partner with Microsoft and Vivisimo to enable users to drill down past Federal Web pages and search the Internet for state, local, tribal and territorial information, as well as news items and images.
The deal, valued at $1.8 million annually, will significantly expand the scope of FirstGov’s search capability. Currently the portal indexes about 8 million Web pages from the Federal government. The venture with MSN Search and Vivisimo—which operates the Clusty.com clustering search engine—will expand that index to more than three times that size.
Enhancements to the FirstGov portal will also allow users to access news and images from a number of disparate government resources—for example, the multiple government agencies taking photos of hurricanes such as Katrina and Rita—in a single Web search.
Other new search services will be geared toward specific audience segments, such as children and Spanish-speaking users.
