Gavin, 22 December 04
“If people don’t know what you’re doing, they don’t know what you’re doing wrong.” Sir Arnold, Yes Minister
Can you believe how useless the UK government’s multi-million pound web site main search function is? Neither could these good people at democracy.org.uk who spent all of 94 minutes knocking up something a bit better .
At first I thought it was perhaps being unfair on the government search which turned up very generic results. I thought that by tweaking the search terms it might be that the official site would prove more useful. Unfortunately there seems no way to refine the terms and it laughs at attempts to use boolean logic: You searched for ‘government OR AND OR policies’
The directionlessgov improved search quite simply directs to a search on google within the .gov.uk domain and is much more useful. There is one nice exception – searches on identity cards lead somewhere else entirely…
