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A search engine by and for the federal government

search.gov

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Re: A search engine by and for the federal government

#61

Post by nitwit005 »

polartx wrote: post #55
adgjlsfhk1 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it's the virtuous cycle of Republicans running on the meme that the government is inherently bad, then using their power to make it worse

Oh look, only took 7 comments to find someone that is making the assertion that bad UX is a partisan issue.

It's essentially true. Look at the battle over the IRS trying to make it easier to file taxes. Republicans are strongly opposed.

If the government websites are too good, a lot of useless middlemen will be out of business.

Re: A search engine by and for the federal government

#62

Post by coolsuds420 »

nitwit005 wrote: post #61
polartx wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh look, only took 7 comments to find someone that is making the assertion that bad UX is a partisan issue.

It's essentially true. Look at the battle over the IRS trying to make it easier to file taxes. Republicans are strongly opposed. If the government websites are too good, a lot of useless middlemen will be out of business.

It’s partisan. Progressives obfuscate important information like mug shots and information about the race and intelligence of criminals.

Re: A search engine by and for the federal government

#63

Post by rovr138 »

fmbb wrote: post #32
Karrot_Kream wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is how you increase the cost of government services. Though it would be nice if over time the government developed their own alternatives.

How would removing tag manager make this website more expensive to run?

It would require a dev every time someone wants to track something new.

It would require rerunning ci/cd, testing, qa to bake it in, in case it fails and breaks something.

All of that is hours of resources which translates directly into money.

With GTM, planning still occurs, organization, but someone can try something, have a debugger to iterate on, once done, hit publish. No need for dev, testing, qa, ci/cd time, breaking, reverting, etc.

Re: A search engine by and for the federal government

#64

Post by popalchemist »

polartx wrote: post #55
adgjlsfhk1 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it's the virtuous cycle of Republicans running on the meme that the government is inherently bad, then using their power to make it worse

Oh look, only took 7 comments to find someone that is making the assertion that bad UX is a partisan issue.

It may not be true in principle, but it's true in practice.

Re: A search engine by and for the federal government

#65

Post by darby_nine »

neilv wrote: post #45
SquareWheel wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd image it's pretty typical analytics stuff. • Logging events for errors. • Seeing device statistics to know which browsers/devices to support/optimize for. • Reviewing page flows to understand how users navigate/understand the site. Is the navigation easy to understand? Are the right pages highly-visible? • Seeing which pages have high drop off rates, indicating either a resolution or lost hope. • Analyzing trends…

(Thanks for responding.) How can this not come from a self-hosted, secure and privacy-respecting, analytics tool? Even their existing normal HTTP/HTTPS Web server access logs give them all of the things you listed. Even at almost the start of the Web, they did. Google Tag Manager is a surveillance tool for the benefit of Google. And they pitch it to companies as: > Google Analytics lets you measure your advertising R…

All of these concerns are also well levied against private enterprise, which americans are loathe to actually regulate. If you want any hope of government services undercutting private enterprise (as you should) this attitude will just hamstring the effort.

Re: A search engine by and for the federal government

#66

Post by benced »

vasco wrote: post #34
benced wrote: post #4

The new tech stuff the government has been putting out is legitimately fantastic. login.gov is probably my favorite sign-in experience, maybe slightly behind Google's (and considerably ahead of Apple or Microsoft's).

It's funny we expect governments stuff to be so bad that when they do something at the level of a regular SaaS our minds are blown.

To be clear, I like login.gov considerably more than random SaaS logins.

Re: A search engine by and for the federal government

#67

Post by georgeplusplus »

britta wrote: post #50
georgeplusplus wrote: post #44

The gov usually contracts out its coding. Waa this made contractors under the federal gov or actual gov employees?

The team is a mix of employees and contractors. They also offer customers (government agencies who use their service) the option to use Bing results or their in-house Elasticsearch results: https://search.gov/admin-center/content/content-overview.htm... They do good work, and it’s an important service. I believe it saves a ton of money for the federal government by reducing reinvention of the wheel. As a former feder…

It's good too see I wish gov would make more in house solutions instead of contacting it out.

At my department that's all we do. Farm it out to 365 or beltway defense companies

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