The Out-Googling of Governments

posted by Josh Goodman

I just googled Louisville and was surprised by the result.

The first hit? Louisville.com, an entertainment Web site.

Number two? The University of Louisville.

Third? The Convention and Visitors Bureau.

Up fourth? The city's Wikipedia page.

Finally, coming in fifth is the city's official homepage.

This is a trend I'm starting to notice. Government Web sites are slipping down in search engine results (Try googling New Orleans, for example).

In some sense, I'm sure that's gratifying to municipalities. It means that there is enough going on in their jurisdiction that someone other than the government has a well-visited Web site.

However, the trend also deprives governments of a form of message control. The person who knows nothing about a place and wants to get a bit of information will, quite likely, get that first bit of information from somewhere other than the government's Web site. And how will anyone know that Louisville is "Possibility City" if they don't visit the city's official homepage?

Comments

[Marc]

"deprives governments of a form of message control"

Great - I can see some dimwit state legislator working on the "Municipal Google Rank Act" now.

[Jason]

"Government Web sites are slipping down in search engine results"

This is exactly why I created a search engine dedicated solely to politics and public policy - www.polisphere.com. Working in the public policy arena myself, I kept finding that the information I was looking for was buried among pages of irrelevant results. For example, try searching for "pre-k" (a hot topic now) on google. Only one result on the first page has anything to do with public policy. Compare that to the amount of relevant policy information you get at www.polisphere.com. In addition, on Polisphere you can refine your results and search only state government websites, local government websites, federal government websites, policy organizations, or media outlets, depending on what you are looking for.

For those working in government or public policy, this can be a helpful resource, so I encourage you to check it out.

[Doug]

Sheer volume of traffic is not the only (or even greatest) factor Google uses to rank pages. The number (and source) of incoming links is the more important factor. So, if the goverment/official page is useful enough to the users that it gets lots of "quality" links, then it will help to boost the page rank. If the official site is purely "message control," then the lack of incoming links would reflect that and lower the rank accordingly.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank

I see no "problem" here.

[Phil]

Who said governments should have the final say on the message of their locality?

I would wager that Google's page rank does a better job of describing the location than a government website that usually has an overly-optimistic motto.

In any case, Wikipedia has much more useful information than most government websites....

[Rob]

Strange. I went on to Polisphere and searched Enfield, CT and the municipal page doesn't even come up in the top 10. I clicked on Local Government and it still didn't come up.