Digital.gov Search

News and Events on Digital.gov Search

42 posts

Get to know Search.gov

Search.gov’s goal is to deliver a high-quality, government-wide search engine that allows agencies to customize search experiences for the public, regardless of website type or organization. Learn about standard offerings, as well as three major enhancements. — via USA.gov

Jul 25, 2023

Policy

Go-Live Checklist for Federal Websites

Covering the breadth of federal web policy, the new downloadable checklist organizes policy requirements into nine categories and explains what your agency needs to do to meet each requirement.

Posts by Rachel Flagg

Jan 13, 2022

Search Metrics

The Federal Web in the Year of COVID-19

The past year was like no other. We take a look at how it affected federal website traffic and search data.

Posts by Dawn Pointer McCleskey Posts by Tim Lowden

Apr 16, 2021

Search.gov: 2019 in Review

In 2019, Search.gov served 295,916,305 queries across more than 2,000 government websites. Find out more in their annual report, including the most common topics that people searched for. — via Search.gov

Jan 27, 2020

How Search Engines Index Your Websites

Join Search.gov as they walk you through the fundamentals of how search engines monitor your content and pull relevant data from your pages.

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Posts by Dawn Pointer McCleskey

May 29, 2018 2018

An Introduction to Search.gov

Learn about the essential features of Search.gov and tour its Admin Center.

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Posts by Dawn Pointer McCleskey

May 03, 2018 2018

Dear Search: Reading Between the Lines of Search Data

Welcome to the first Dear Search article, an occasional series where the DigitalGov Search team addresses common search questions. Dear Search, Right now, I am building up user research services that can be offered to product owners on a regular or as-needed basis. So, being able to look at search trends and offer advice to

Posts by Dawn Pointer McCleskey

Oct 21, 2016

DNSSEC vs. Elastic Load Balancers: the Zone Apex Problem

This is the final post in the 5-part series, The Right Tools for the Job: Re-Hosting DigitalGov Search to a Dynamic Infrastructure Environment. Federal websites are required to implement DNSSEC, which relies on knowing exactly what server is responding to a request. In Amazon Web Services (AWS), the problem of unreliable servers is solved by

Posts by Nick Marden

Sep 12, 2016

Let’s Encrypt Those CNAMES, Shall We?

This is post 4 in the 5-part series, The Right Tools for the Job: Re-Hosting DigitalGov Search to a Dynamic Infrastructure Environment. This post references the previous posts frequently, so please read those before reading this one if you haven’t done so already. In addition to the DNS challenges created by offering “masked” domains such

Posts by Nathan Smith Posts by Dawn Pointer McCleskey

Sep 07, 2016

A Domain by Any Other Name: CNAMES, Wildcard Records and Another Level of Indirection

This is post 3 in the 5-part series The Right Tools for the Job: Re-Hosting DigitalGov Search to a Dynamic Infrastructure Environment. “All problems in computer science can be solved by another level of indirection, except of course for the problem of too many indirections.” – David Wheeler The simplest of our four requirements was

Posts by Nick Marden

Sep 06, 2016

Quality, Speed, and Lower Costs: Yes, You Can Have It All

This is post 2 in the 5-part series The Right Tools for the Job: Re-Hosting DigitalGov Search to a Dynamic Infrastructure Environment. The last major infrastructure upgrade that DigitalGov Search had was in 2010. Not only has technology evolved significantly since then, but so have business models for right-sizing costs. Moving to Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Posts by Nick Marden Posts by Dawn Pointer McCleskey

Sep 02, 2016

The Right Tools for the Job: Re-Hosting DigitalGov Search to a Dynamic Infrastructure Environment

This is the first post of a 5-part series. DigitalGov Search is a commercial-grade search engine provided as a shared-service by the United States General Services Administration. We power about 2,300 search configurations for hundreds of federal, state, and local government agencies. Using our platform, agencies can easily configure a search experience for the public that

Posts by Dawn Pointer McCleskey

Aug 18, 2016

What Are Your Customers Searching For?

What are your agency’s website visitors looking for? Can they find it easily? How do you know? Search analytics provide valuable data that can positively affect an agency’s Web strategy. This topic was the focus of a recent webinar, Show Me the Data: Leveraging Analytics in DigitalGov Search. Dawn Pointer McCleskey, acting program manager for

Posts by Ashley Wichman

Jan 08, 2016

DigitalGov Podcast: Bridging Content and Discovery Through DigitalGov Search

Recently, search analyst Dawn McCleskey sat down with us to discuss the work of DigitalGov Search.

Posts by Ashley Wichman

Oct 30, 2015

How OSTP Crowdsourced A Crowdsourcing Toolkit

To promote crowdsourcing, one effective tool is, well, crowdsourcing. Today, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) and the Federal Community of Practice for Crowdsourcing and Citizen Science (CCS) unveiled the Citizen Science and Crowdsourcing Toolkit. The toolkit contains information, resources, and best practices federal agencies can use to harness the power

Posts by Ashley Wichman

Sep 30, 2015

HTTPS and Other Ranking Factors: What Impacts the SEO of Government Websites?

Following the recent OMB memo that all publicly available federal websites and Web services must implement HTTPS by December 31, 2016, Web content managers across government are considering the SEO (search engine optimization) implications of the transition, among other details.

Posts by Dawn Pointer McCleskey

Sep 02, 2015

Search, Buscar, Поиск, جستجو, Cari: Creating a Good, Multilingual Search Experience

Government agencies across the United States publish content in a growing number of languages to do the business of the country. In 2015, DigitalGov Search dramatically expanded support for languages on our search results page, expanding from just English and Spanish to support 68 different languages.

Posts by Dawn Pointer McCleskey

Aug 31, 2015

Trends on Tuesday: The Impact of ‘Mobilegeddon’ on Non Mobile-Friendly Sites

Adobe released its quarterly Adobe Digital Index report this month, which showed websites that aren’t mobile optimized are seeing more than double-digit drops in traffic from Google’s organic search referrals. This is after the leading search engine announced it would start penalizing websites, after April 21st, that weren’t optimized for mobile—also called “Mobilegeddon.” Microsoft’s Bing search engine also

Posts by Will Sullivan

Aug 11, 2015

Monthly Theme: At Your Service

In this digital age, we know customers expect their government interactions to be on the same level as their interactions with the private sector. Agencies are always striving to improve the quality of their services to meet their customers’ needs. So too in our office, where we use the feedback, you, our agency customers, provide

Posts by Andrea Sigritz

Aug 05, 2015

#SocialGov Round Up 2015

The #SocialGov Community is coming up on three years of hard work and pushing the boundaries on using social tools across the federal government. I’d like to start this round up by taking a look at the event we hosted last year, State of the #SocialGov 2014: 2 Years of Smashing Silos + Elevating Citizen

Posts by Alycia Piazza

Jun 08, 2015

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