A search engine by and for the federal government
search.gov
search.gov
Will require biometrics in some form, with fallback to in person proofing at USPS.
(no affiliation, just a fan)
Just look at the significant links section
Here in Ohio we have the Intel plant going up just east of me, goverment spending is great when it works and thats what the Dems have become all about. But the flip side is our courts have been sold off to the highest bidder and our juvinile and family court systems are run like for porfit orphanages with the legal right to seperate children from their families [1]. Big government is great when it works but terrifying when it overreaches as is happening now.
I'm glad everyone is making money but, in more ways than one, we are simply incurring a debt that will have to be paid back by our children.
1. https://www.amazon.com/Injustice-Inc-Americas-Commodifies-Ch...
If the government websites are too good, a lot of useless middlemen will be out of business.
• 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 over time to better understand users and the topics they're focused on. Is there high traffic to covid-19 symptom pages? Or maybe student loan forgiveness resources?
I can see a lot of meaningful and actionable data being gleaned from such systems. It's much more difficult to make improvements without supporting data.
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 ROI as well as track your Flash, video, and social networking sites and applications
That's the first blurb on the first Web search hit. It's targeted as a tool for marketing people who brag about the large size of their ad spend on Google AdWords, and then need to make Powerpoints to justify that.
And who are often mimicked by people who don't know any better, but think it's best practice, because they saw a grownup doing it. Or they copy&pasted it from somewhere without understanding.
And when it's on a gov't public information system, it's leaking data about citizens to a private company known to snoop on everything it can, even secretly and against reasonable expectation of privacy.
(For example, in this case, who would know that by using a prominent Web site of the federal government, their behavior on that site is leaked to Google, who, due to other snooping, can attribute it to them personally as an individual. Like, if they walked into a Federal building, to consult an official, and Google had placed hidden cameras and microphones, that it controlled, throughout the building, and even followed them to and from the federal building.)
And, technically, it introduces an additional security weakness, by loading and running code from some site not under gov't control. Which, as we just saw for the nth time yesterday, is almost never well-placed trust. And for no good reason; only mistaken-at-best reasons.
That's just an example. Most other techbro "best practice" third-party requests have similar problems, or even worse, and are similarly unnecessary.
If there is a legitimate need for some of that functionality--which I think is plausible but not certain--then they may have an interesting response.
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.
Government departments tend to be slow to adopt - again, based on feeling more than hard evidence - especially emin Germany. They'll just try to find some scapegoat for why they're failing, and GDPR is perfect. I've seen the same in businesses as well, where I've seen told numerous times they're behind schedule because of GDPR or they can't do this because of GDPR and it's just not true most of the time. People just like to hide their incompetence
I don't know anything about EVB-IT, so I'll shut up about that part
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 federal employee and current federal contractor, it’s been very helpful to be able to use their no-cost-to-customer search services on multiple projects. On my current project we eventually shifted to doing our own search (using Postgres full text search) so we could customize the indexing and ranking, but Search.gov was a useful interim solution.
At my department that's all we do. Farm it out to 365 or beltway defense companies
"Sorry, no results found for 'Israel'. Try entering fewer or more general search terms."
https://find.search.gov/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&affiliate=usas...
>Are you looking for information from across government? Please search again on USA.gov. Click the "Search again on USA.gov" link above the search button here, or use the link below to go to the main USA.gov website. Search.gov is a service powering the search boxes on government agencies' websites. You are currently searching the Search.gov website, and this website only contains information about our service.