No, they are right. This is basically just GOV.uk for America, and GOV.uk by all accounts is an incredible success.
And that is the huge problem here; it's not "search on steroids", it's "Ministry of Truth" on steroids.
Did you look at usa.gov at all?
It is less effort and requires less time than america.gov's:
Type "find affordable housing near me", wait praying for relevant results, recieve irrelevant results due to my rural isp having flaky geoip, told to click on the same link I already got grom usa.gov or one of three other irrelevant links or call this irrelevant phone number.
So my tax dollars are now funding a worse way to get worse results to people who can't use a well formatted site that they won't benefit from because they'll trust it implicitly despite it being demonstrably less reliable.
Brilliant.
A few queries that I couldn’t find answers to through that site:
* How can you get a permit for a group event in a national forest?
* How can I become a federal contractor as a small business?
* Where do I go to get an amateur radio license and what are the steps involved?
* What are the requirements for purchasing tribal land?
Basically usa.gov seems to mainly exist for people following the “happy path”—go to school, get a job or run a simple business, get health insurance, buy a house, retire. It’s got a few exceptions for large minority groups. But the issue is that the total number of people deviating from that path is huge, even if they only need to find one thing that’s not on the path. Right now they rely on commercial search to get answers, which often leads them to scam sites or intermediaries who take a cut for filing paperwork.
It's rijksoverheid.nl in my country- good luck to any poor expat trying to pronounce that lol.
Neither the UK or CA versions have "here's an LLM you can make general inquiries to" though; at least for now that appears to be unique to america.gov. Unclear to me why this required a separate domain with all this branding on it vs just being one of those "let our chatbot help you out!!!" popup widgets on the existing usa.gov.