Briefs: Will SEO Become The Law For Federal Agencies; UK PM Brown Wants Web Help to Fight Online Terror Propaganda
+ Will SEO Become The Law For Federal Agencies (via SEL)
Barry "I Don't Track" Schwartz discusses a Google Public Policy Blog post about the E-Government Reauthorization Act of 2007 that includes legislation that government sites are optimized for search engine retrieval.
(1) Members of the public and governments commonly rely on commercial search engines to locate relevant information on the worldwide web, including information made available by government agencies; and (2) some Federal agencies have not taken actions to make all of the information available through their websites readily accessible to commercial search engines. Some Federal agencies have not taken actions to make all of the information available through their websites readily accessible to commercial search engines.
It will be interesting to see if Microsoft has anything to say about this especially since its crawler deals with U.S. Federal Government content to power the official U.S. government portal, USA.gov in conjunction with Vivisimo. Of course, this legislation applies to all search engine crawlers, not only Google's or Live.com's. If you would like to track this legislation, "Section 4" to precise, here's a link for S.2321 via GovTrack.US. RSS feed desired? No problem. Here's the URL.
One final comment, simply providing access to crawlable content means that the overall size of the database will increase but does nothing to guarantee it will be retrieved using the tools and strategies typical searches use and with a general purpose database. OK, to use an overused analogy, it makes the haystack bigger. This is why specialty databases can often be of major value like USA.gov. Btw, USA.gov now has a mobile site at http://mobile.usa.gov. Google also has a government focused dbase (aka "Uncle Sam").
U.K. Prime Minister Gordon Brown wants Internet companies to help stifle online terrorist propaganda, he told lawmakers Wednesday, as officials say they plan to meet leading service providers to find ways of putting a lid on extremist content.
But the providers argue they already do all they can to fight illegal terrorist material online, and experts say even powerful filters cannot block determined users from getting their message out.
"Fundamentally, it's a losing proposition," said Ian Brown, a research fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute, noting that even countries such as China and Myanmar have had trouble with their online censorship efforts.
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