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APPENDIX 19. FIRSTGOV.GOV: A PRELIMINARY ASSESSMENT 

Note: This is a preliminary evaluation of the FirstGov project, including a comparison 

of the FirstGov portal with the comparable effort in the United Kingdom, called UK 

online. The author agreed to undertake this analysis at the request of the Commission 

in connection with the its Comprehensive Assessment of Public Information 

Dissemination. The views expressed herein are entirely the author's and do not 

necessarily reflect the official views of the Commission. 

Written by William H. Price, Member, NCLIS Group of Experts for This Assessment 

A PRELIMINARY ASSESSMENT OF FIRSTGOV11

On June 24, 2000, the lead article on CNN.com announced: "In historic "Website chat," Clinton 

unveils era of U.S. "e-government."12 The President said that a new Internet site, FirstGov.gov, would 

be launched in about 90 days (meaning late September 2000, but the search engine developer, Inktomi, 

indicates "early November" is a more realistic date). In the words of the President: 

It will be linked to all federal information Web sites -- the world's largest collection. 

... When its complete FirstGov will serve as a single point of entry to one of the 

largest, perhaps the most useful collection of Web pages in the entire world.13

The President said FirstGov will offer individuals, small businesses, and others a single source for 

information from the federal government: 

Whether you want crucial information in starting a small business, or you want to 

track your Social Security benefits, you can do it all in one place, 24 hours a day, 

seven days a week," in starting a small business, or you want to track your Social 

Security benefits, you can do it all in one place, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.14

The FirstGov site will be managed by the General Services Administration (GSA). FirstGov replaces 

WebGov, a project initiated several years ago by this same agency. The GSA Administrator, David 

Barram, indicated that one error in judgment relating to the way WebGov was approached was the 

failure to involve the public and private sectors in a partnership configuration. Instead, the government 

tried to do the whole job itself. A contest to cull new ideas in electronic government service was also 

announced. The nonprofit Council for Excellence in Government agreed to award $50,000 for the best 

ideas. 

In articles appearing since the June 24th announcement, the figure of 100 million government Web 

pages has been mentioned, to be accessible through a "single portal," the new state-of-the-art term of 

 

11 Available at http://www.nclis.gov/govt/assess/assess.appen19.pdf. The first segment of this appendix was last revised on 

September 15, 2000. 

12 In historic 'Webside chat,' Clinton unveils era of U.S. 'e-government' June 24, 2000, 

http://www.cnn.com/2000/ALLPOLITICS/stories/06/24/clinton.webcast/index.html. 13 Ibid. 

14 Ibid. 
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preference for a single web site permitting access to a large number of other web sites. The idea of 

providing a "single, one stop service" for government information is not a new one. To the contrary, 

the idea is almost as old as the Nation itself. However, all have faced enormous, some insurmountable 

difficulties in the past for a wide variety of reasons. 

FirstGov is a portal that affords citizens, businesses, state and local government officials, and other 

government information users the opportunity to search using a single federal government home page. 

Interestingly, an agency or other government entity must "buy into" FirstGov by first agreeing to 

become a "certified partner." There are certain obligations and conditions that must first be met before 

the applying entity can be considered certified. 

The search engine and database index are being developed by a nonprofit group headed by Eric 

Brewer, Chief Scientist at Inktomi Corporation in Foster City, California. In press materials the 

company announced that its search engine could search 500 million Web pages in 0.25 seconds. GSA 

Administrator Barram indicated that Brewer suggested the idea to the President while attending the 

World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland in January 2000. It remains to be seen if the 

technology will be as sophisticated as the marketing of this capability. 

My purpose here is merely to highlight on some of the more significant challenges. I believe the idea 

of a "pilot test" is, indeed, a very useful initiative, and the President is to be applauded for forging 

ahead with this initiative. The very experience of attempting to bring up the Web site will, in my view, 

underscore the need for fundamental reforms in the way the federal government's information is 

"captured," identified, organized and structured, maintained and stored, managed throughout its entire 

information life cycle, and ultimately archived or disposed of. It will also have the sobering impact of 

exposing millions of Americans to the incredible array of government information that is "theirs for 

the asking." But it will also, inevitably, carry some disappointments as citizens begin to realize that 

searching for information is a very time-consuming, complex, and altogether formidable chore, much 

less having finally located it, then downloading it or otherwise retrieving it for use. 

Here are some of the challenges. 

1. The United States government generates an enormous amount of information, both nationally 

from the central federal government in Washington, D.C., and regionally at the state, local, and 

tribal government levels, as well as abroad at U.S. embassies, military bases, and specialized 

agency offices that require foreign representation. What will the scope of FirstGov be? Moreover, 

there is lots of "government information" that is not .gov for a variety of reasons. One is that the 

government has entered into some kind of contractual or informal arrangement with a contractor, 

an individual, a university, or some other kind of institution or group, to perform work for it. Is all 

of the information generated by those government agents and surrogates also going to be 

included? 

2. Retrievability of information, whether government information or any other kind of information, 

is immeasurably simplified and speeded up the way the information to be searched is organized 

and structured in the first place. Unfortunately, the government does not organize its data, 

documents, and literature around commonly used subject headings, like most of the library, 

archival, museum, and journalism worlds do. Instead, the information is organized around agency 

names, agency missions, agency functions, and similar "bureaucratic buzz words." Correlating 

those bureaucratic classifications with commonly used subject terms is a chore that has thus far 

defied repeated efforts by many different bibliographic experts and expert groups over the years. 

The need for now coming to grips squarely with this correlation is acute in the electronic 

information age. Intuition is not much help here. Who, other than an experienced bureaucrat, 

knows that marriages, births, and deaths is information produced and made available by the 
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Census Bureau? Who, other than an experienced government documents librarian, would know 

that permits for operating a boat in an inland navigable waterway is issued by the Coast Guard? 

The examples are virtually endless. 

3. Agencies are already being criticized for bringing information products up one day on one of their 

web sites and taking it down the next. How will citizens react to this approach to web site 

integrity? Even worse, an entire web site is brought up one day and disappears the next. Some 

agencies have admitted they neither know, nor can control the number of web sites their own 

agencies have established. GSA officials say "the pressure of the public in demanding tighter 

quality controls over web site and web page integrity will force agencies to correct this situation." 

One study indicates that of the approximately 20,000 federal web sites, many have been entirely 

abandoned or their contents is so badly outdated as to be virtually useless. 

4. Index terms, like governmental functions themselves, are not static, they are dynamic. The argot 

of the day changes from hour to hour, from day to day. A dynamic, empirically developed online 

thesaurus of search terms is a critical requirement to assist users. Many an online database has 

been wrecked on the shoals of static indexing systems and thesauri that simply could not rise to 

the challenge. 

5. Agency policies, guidelines, standards, and procedures governing the posting of public 

information products to their web sites are few and far between. Of course to a large extent 

agencies cannot be faulted too harshly on that score because they are just starting down the path of 

the Internet. What is less forgivable, however, is the lack of leadership in OMB in this area. There 

are some commendable policies in place, but they are not being evaluated and extended on a 

government-wide basis. 

6. According to NCLIS, there is no single, central, authoritative official within agencies that has 

clear responsibility and authority for online publishing. It would appear the public affairs offices 

in some cases have this responsibility, but in others it is the CIO, and in others it is still the print 

publishing official who now has both electronic and pre-electronic publishing responsibility. 

There is nothing wrong with different agencies using different models of responsibility and 

authority that are tailored to their unique needs, but what is not permissible is the failure of the 

agency head to pinpoint responsibility somewhere, in some office, in someone. 

7. It is far from clear how security, privacy, and confidentiality concerns will be addressed. Who 

controls these determinations, and who will be the final approving authority? One of the most 

difficult problems faced by librarians and other information professionals is the challenge of 

determining the authenticity of the data they are viewing on a web page: "Is this the official copy 

I'm looking at, or is this an unofficial copy?" This is an extremely difficulty challenge and one that 

NCLIS ran into when it did a survey several years ago of some 23 different federal agencies and 

over 300 specific government information products. Many agencies felt, for example, that just list 

their agency name on the web page, or the name of its agency head, was adequate to reassure the 

viewer that the information was official!

8. Information literacy is another problem. While there is a current excitement over the thousands of 

new "dot.coms," dot.govs," "dot.edus" and dot this and dot that which are coming up hourly, 

already the frustrations of knowing how to navigate even a single web site, much less across sites, 

are turning many users off. There is certainly a need for an online navigation course that users 

who do not possess the requisite computer and information literacy skills can take to bring them 

up to speed with those skills.

9. The "crawlers" as they are called, are blind and is not the best technology to get into a database. 

Moreover, crawlers can be very intrusive, and too many crawlers acting concurrently have been 

known to cause very serious problems in searching sites. Moreover, crawls should be 

comprehensive instead of sampling in their approach.
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10. Government Information Locator System (GILS) compliancy is another challenge, and it is 

doubtful that FirstGov, at least initially, will be GILS-compliant. Experience so far in 

implementing GILS at the agency level has been uneven at best. However, in the long run, the 

very existence of a single, one stop portal for accessing government information augurs well for 

the value of a GILS (whether the current one or a future iteration) since the value of an 

authoritative, comprehensive metadata tool to assist in identifying, locating, and describing 

government information should be incontrovertibly underscored. 

In short, the challenges are legion, but the need for such a pilot test far outweighs the fear of posing 

more new questions than answers can be provided. This has always been the classic dilemma of 

diffusing new technologies, and information technologies are no exception. The government must 

participate actively in the pilot test, and the lessons learned must be carefully documented so that the 

next generation of federal search engines can profit by the inevitable shortcomings. NCLIS should 

participate in the pilot test since it is an inseparable project from their current study of public 

information dissemination reforms. Certainly the players involved must provide advice and guidance 

in this Herculean undertaking. 

A COMPARISON OF THE UNITED STATES AND UNITED KINGDOM INTERNET 

GATEWAYS15

The United States Government and the Government of the United Kingdom are among several 

national governments to offer an Internet gateway into their official information sources as well as the 

services available. The United States site is identified as "First Gov" and is available at 

http://www.firstgov.gov/ and is readily recognized by its colorful banner of the United States flag. The 

United Kingdom site is identified as "UK online Citizen Portal" and is available at 

http://www.ukonline.gov.uk/. These two sites differ principally in the scope of information available. 

Both are presented in a manner to facilitate ease of use. They offer a new outreach to their citizens in 

navigating through government information and services that are available. 

These two important services were reviewed to determine ease of use as well as the scope and depth of 

information available. The topics chosen for review focused on three aspects of both governments: 

acquisition of housing, Federal benefits and National Security intelligence activities. 

Summary of Findings 

 

Depending on the information or service sought, navigating FirstGov or UK online to produce desired 

results can be time consuming and a complicated task. A user will be confronted with the need to use 

synonyms to "accurately" locate desired information. An example in this review is "home" and 

"house". The facilities for searching and identifying information are available, but the information is 

vast and often expressed in unfamiliar terms. Adequate time, patience and determination are required 

for those in need of the information or service. 

The differences in scope and depth of information available from these two systems are indicative of 

the size of the two governments and size of the Nations they support. The ability to provide a hub or 

focal point for information from all the components in government is remarkable. Equally remarkable 

is the effort made by government agencies to capture and digitize information in their sphere of 

responsibility. These information facilities allow a citizen to cut across agency and department lines to 

 

15 This segment of the appendix was submitted to NCLIS on January 8, 2001. 
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locate desired information. An example is "pesticides". Several agencies have responsibility for 

dealing with this issue, but from their perspectives and spheres of responsibility. To some degree, a 

citizen may not be required to know the structure of their government, nor the names of the 

departments as a prerequisite for to finding needed information 

The Introductory and Welcome Page

FirstGov 

The United States site is introduced by a colorful banner of the United States flag and FirstGov - Your 

First Click to the U.S. Government. The central menu on this page lists key information topics such as 

"Agriculture and Food, Farms, Food Nutrition"; "Consumer Services and Safety"; "Environment and 

Energy, Weather", "Federal Benefits and Grants, Social Security, Medicare"; "Money and Taxes"; 

"The U.S. in the World, Defense. Trade, Immigration" are among the 16 topics presented for selection 

as a gateway to more information. 

Additionally, a citizen can access information from any of the three branches of government as well as 

state and local governments. Featured Subjects such as Consumer Handbook, Federal Business 

Opportunities, and Government for Kids are among the subjects that can be accessed by a click. 

At the top of this introductory page is the ability to search across the government for information on a 

subject such as pesticides, water pollution, etc. This is an important feature that can access information 

which is held by several government agencies with varying responsibilities for a given subject. The 

citizen may not be familiar with what agencies this information resides in, but this provides the access 

to wherever the information may reside. 

UK Online 

This Welcome page also uses a colorful rainbow banner, but it presents the user with fewer choices for 

access. There are four major topics represented by four graphic icons: Quick Find, Life Episodes, 

Citizen Space, and Getting the UK online. Unfortunately, the sub-titles that further define these 

choices are difficult to read because of the font and small font size. Under each icon is a Go button to 

launch access. Across the top are buttons to access About this site, Contact us, UK online for business, 

Help, and a Site map. 

Citizen Portal Members may Register as a new user, Sign in, or Recover a forgotten password. You 

may also Personalize Your Citizen Portal as to where in the UK you live – England, Scotland, Wales 

or Northern Ireland; your language - English or Cymraeg?, and preferences. 

This opening page is sparse with choices, but it may offer a citizen a less complicated entry to needs. 

Important is the ability to search for a subject or topic. 

Review 1 - Acquiring a Home 

First Gov 

Bypassing a selection of Executive Branch Agencies and going directly to search for "House", 

produced 344,377 irrelevant matches. Even with "purchase" added as a qualifier, the results were 

similar. Among the matches to "House Purchase" were how to get White House tickets, Colombian 

Military Aid Package, and "Bipartisan Death Tax Repeal". 
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Lacking pertinent results from this direct search, the Executive Branch was selected. This produced an 

index of all government departments. From this list, Housing and Urban Development was selected. 

This produced a list of agency functions, and "Housing" was selected. This produced a page titled 

"Own a Home" which contained selections for "first Time Home buyers, and a "Home buyer's Kit". 

There was also topic titled "Homes for sale by HUD listed by State". 

Taking the approach by Executive Branch and Department of Housing and Urban Development had 

produced results that a direct search of the words "home" and "purchase" had failed to yield. However, 

the average citizen may not know enough of the government structure to make such a probe. 

UK online Citizen Portal 

From the Welcome page, the icon "Quick find" was selected to produce another page that offered 

search facilities. The term "own home" produced 254,884 results. The top 500 were arrayed by 

relevance. However, most of these matches were not pertinent. "Buying on the Internet" was selected, 

but this produced a page of buying tips, regulations, and rights as a consumer. 

The information produced was interesting, but it was not what was sought—specific houses for sale. 

Review 2 - Qualifying and Applying for Federal Benefits 

First Gov 

A search on the Welcome Page for Benefits produced 511,173 matches. Within the top ten, which 

scored 98 percent relevance, were three that addressed Social Security Benefits, all three were 

identical, and one gave guidance on Health Benefits. A substantial percentage applied to benefits 

available only to Federal government employees. 

Alternatively, on the Welcome page the Executive Branch was selected, and on the next page a listing 

of departments in the Executive Branch was presented headed by an emphasized category titled 

"Interesting Topics" and "Federal Benefits and Grants". Selecting this category produces a list 

featuring three topics: Social Security, Medicare, and Grants. These are followed by more specific 

links such as Disabilities Benefits, Disaster Assistance, Earned Income Tax Credit, etc. Selecting any 

one of the specific benefits will produce the desired information. 

UK Online 

On the Welcome page, a search for Benefits was made with Find it. It produced 10,903 results and 

displayed the top 500 sorted by relevance, the highest of which was 48 percent. A large number 

addressed statutory requirements for specific benefits, namely social security, retirement and pension. 

Ranking 54th in matches with a 42 percent relevance was an item that offered more information to 

assist a citizen to decide about benefits that may be disabled if one is sick or disabled. This is followed 

by "Young Peoples Guide to Social Security" and "Social Security Terms and Conditions of 

Employment" 

Items returned by the search have the word "benefits" highlighted where it occurs in the title of 

explanation. To the right of each is a Button with an Arrow labeled GO to further access information 

for items. 
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Review 3 - National Security and Defense 

The third and final search used for review was a National security subject common to both Nations, 

ECHELON. The ECHELON Project is based on a worldwide satellite system for monitoring 

electronic communications encompassing cell and wireless telephones and other electronic exchanges. 

This system was developed by the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) with the participation of 

several countries. A major part of this system is a large antenna array and downlink station at Menwith 

Hills, England. The purpose of this review was to determine how forthcoming the information systems 

of both governments are. 

As background, a search for ECHELON on Internet, using Altavista or Excite, yields a number of 

news articles dealing with this very sophisticated, highly innovative and near real-time system. Yahoo 

has a collection to references of all articles published on ECHELON. Satellites are used to intercept 

voice communications and transfer them to a computer system that compares these sounds to a table of 

keywords in multiple languages. If a match with certain words in the sound bank occurs, the 

conversation is routed to a linguist for listening and analysis. All of this is done in near real time from 

intercept to review. One magazine published that the conversation between an official in a government 

and a party in another country was intercepted, and that money was authorized for blowing up the 

enlisted men's building in Saudi Arabia. The Army was warned but did not act on the information. 

This system has been widely discussed and debated in the Parliament of the European Community. 

Concerns focus on the invasion of privacy, and the potential use of this information for industrial 

espionage to give American corporations an economic advantage. 

First Gov 

A search on the Welcome page produced 2,123 matches, practically all of which were irrelevant. 

However, the one relevant hit dealt with threats by a Congressman to expose the project, despite the 

fact that it is already known. No additional searches were performed to locate any information on this 

subject. 

UK online 

A similar search was made using Find it on the Welcome page. It only produced two matches of 28 

and 15 percent relevance. Neither dealt with ECHELON. Since a major satellite downlink station is 

located at Menwith Hills, a search was made of this name. Twenty four results were found ranging 

downward from 48 percent relevance. Six of these may address Menwith Hills since two are from the 

Intelligence and Security Committee, three with House of Commons query to the Secretary of State 

for Defense, and one with the National Asset Register. 

The lack of information from these official organizations only underscores the practice of governments 

not to confirm materials from unofficial sources.