Disappeared: Google’s U.S. Government Search Sites and Other Special Search Interfaces Gone « INFOdocket

 

Disappeared: Google’s U.S. Government Search Sites and Other Special Search Interfaces Gone

Posted on June 6, 2011 by Gary D. Price

In the past few days we began noticing a number of Google Help Forum posts from users reporting that Google’s-Uncle Sam search is unavailable. The Uncle Sam interface provided a search of only government and military material and has been online for MANY years. “Uncle Sam” continues to redirect users to the Google homepage at this hour.

Another Google U.S. government search resource, USGov.Google.com is ALSO redirecting to the Google homepage. This site was “rebranded” on June 15, 2006 and received notice from a variety of sources. The USGov.Google.com documentation does remain online.

Reports say that users first noticed the redirects on June 2, 2011.

On Search Engine Roundtable, Barry Schwartz has also posted on the disappearance of both sites. He points out that Google is using a temporary redirect so perhaps this is a glitch or something else.

We wonder (and this is only a guess) if some new government site is planned to go live next week as USgov.Google.com marks its fifth anniversary.

As we’ve said in the past with similar situations, our issue is not with Google ending a service or temporarily taking it offline.

What does cause concern is that Google doesn’t let users know what’s going on until sometime after it happens or never make an announcement  Just because a service like USGov.Google.com is not used by the masses use doesn’t mean it’s any less important to those who do use it.

The reason for this might have something to do with advanced search sites and features in general. While 95% of users never use advanced search syntax (including members of the search team at Google) there are 5% of users who DO utilize these tools when they’re needed. With the vast amount of resources that Google has it’s difficult to imagine that they don’t have what’s needed to keep updates coming about comings and goings, syntax problems, etc.

In many cases Google is at or near the top of the list for getting their message(s) out to the public but in some situations it appears the opposite is true. We hope that the company looks at why this happens and find a way or ways to combat it.

INFOdocket finds it rather ironic that a company whose mission includes providing access to all of the world’s information has trouble providing updated info to users.

UPDATE: It appears that all of Google’s “Special Searches” for conducting limited searches of material about Linux, Macintosh, BSD, Microsoft as well as Uncle Sam are gone. Again, if this is the case why is the info page still live with the URL’s listed? Confusing! Why couldn’t a sentence or two explaining what’s going on be added to the page?

Disappeared: Google’s U.S. Government Search Sites and Other Special Search Interfaces Gone « INFOdocket

David Rumsey Historical Map Collection

David Rumsey Historical Map Collection 

Now over 100 new maps added to the Rumsey Historical Maps in Google Earth and to a new layer in Google Maps. Read more about these collections.. New! September, 2008, over 30 new maps in Google Earth, including the Wheeler Survey of the U.S. West, 1871-83.

The David Rumsey Historical Map Collection has over 18,460 maps online. The collection focuses on rare 18th and 19th century North American and South American maps and other cartographic materials. Historic maps of the World, Europe, Asia, and Africa are also represented. Collection categories include antique atlas, globe, school geography, maritime chart, state, county, city, pocket, wall, childrens, and manuscript maps. Some examples are United States map, maps New York, California map, Arizona map, America map, New York City map, Chicago map, and Colorado map. The collection can be used to study history, genealogy and family history.

David Rumsey Historical Map Collection

Two new toys for writers

Command line searching of Google! -- HSM

Goosh

I want to take a moment to plug two new tools for writers and researchers. The first I found thanks to Slashdot. It’s called Goosh. Goosh replaces the standard Google web page interface with a simulated command-line shell. As much as I like graphical interfaces, I have found that there are certain tasks that are more efficiently done by using the command line. If you use Google as much as I do, I think that you may find that investing the time to learn this shell saves much time when doing actual searches instead of slogging through endless Google web pages. On my (very) old computer, I find that I can do my Google searches in about 1/10 the time that I can using standard Google.

Here’s is how Goosh works. When you start Goosh, it defaults to web searches. To search the web, all you have to do is type the keyword on the command line. It then shows four results. To see more results, just hit enter. To go to one of these results, type the number of the result that you want and then it will open in a new tab. (It may open in a new window on your machine, since I have Firefox set to automatically open any new window requests in a new tab, unless I tell it to do otherwise.)

Blog searching is just as easy. While your prompt says /web, you have one of two choices. You can change the default search to “blog search” by typing the word “blog”, or if you just want to do a single blog search while leaving the default set for web, just type “blog” followed by your keywords, like so:
blog anarchism

There are a lot more commands available, and a brief summary of them is available by typing “help” at the Goosh prompt.

Goosh is not for the casual Googler, since it requires a little bit of a learning curve. I wish that it had a little more documentation and tutorials than the “help” command. But if you are a hard-core Googler, and are comfortable with command-line interfaces, you might find that it’s a big time saver. As a matter of fact, I am thinking about making Goosh my default start-up page. I’ve only been using it for a couple of days, and I wish that I’d found it years ago.

Two new toys for writers