So the entrepreneurs among them have seized the day. The federal government alone has thousands of Web sites. Some of them are quite useful. There are pages that will help you figure out how to sell to the government, buy from the government, get help with exports or take out a loan guaranteed by the Small Business Administration. Usage has skyrocketed, from 1 to 2 million hits a month in 1995 to 29 million in June.
Employers also find it useful.
As the Labor Department's David Balducci explains, if they weren't finding employees, they would stop posting job openings. But the number has doubled every seven months. In Massachusetts, the One-Stop Career Center program is building a database that will list every provider of adult education or training in the state, along with information about prices, graduation rates, job placement rates, wages earned by graduates and what those graduates say about the programs in customer surveys. Wanted posters are distributed to post offices, grocery stores and police departments as well as on the Web, and the combined effort is having a major impact. Three of the six people on the attorney general's most recent poster turned themselves in within three days.