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Vivisimo, an enterprise search company based in Pennsylvania, announced Thursday that it has expanded its search affiliate program, which offers a free search engine for all government Web sites.
This search platform indexes more than 50 million government documents.
The platform covers news, images, frequently asked questions, maps, and weather forecasts. Searchers can also find government contact information, applications, and notices regarding jobs and benefits. Managers of web sites related to the government can add new features to their sites and even ambiguous search terms will extract useful information, Vivisimo said.
“Using Vivisimo’s superior search technology, and the expanded search affiliate program, anybody can easily access the vast amounts of information collected and generated by the U.S. government,” Raul Valdes-Perez, CEO and co-founder of Vivisimo, said in an announcement. “Vivisimo’s intuitive user-interface turns complexity into simplicity — and will help millions of people to get quick, authoritative answers to their questions.”
The latest version of Velocity’s platform includes Web 2.0 functionalities, like social tagging and social bookmarking.
Early users of the platform include USASearch.gov, the National Library of Medicine, Womenshealth.gov, the governments of New Zealand, and Israel.
This platform, which began with USASearch.gov, will offer citizens searching for information on government sites, at all levels, a faster, more efficient, and usable search experience.
It is interesting to note that government webmasters are seeking high quality vertical search solutions. Companies such as Vivisimo will likely begin to offer similar vertical search technology to industries. It remains to be seen how such offerings will fair against Google’s customizable search product and it’s low price point.
