because a duck may be somebody's mother

Brand spankin' new today! Google announces that they've launched a new U.S. Government Search!

But really, how new is it?

Not so new, really. Some of you might be familiar with Google/Unclesam, which the company hasn't really done a whole lot to promote. It searches across federal and state government websites, along with agencies and other "selected" pages. This seems to be the same M.O. for this new fangled search, so I tested it. I generically searched for "immigration bill" and you know what happened? I got the same exact results from both engines.

So what's the deal? Is Google just recycling an underused engine, or do they really mean to do something different? And also, what's the difference between this and FirstGov's Clustered search powered by Vivisimo?

And more importantly, it just begs for me to point out that it's not really so much about the search engine, but about what data government agencies are making available on their websites. These entities are notoriously stingy with what they make available electronically. It's what I call "the love you make is equal to the love you take" theory of information dissemination. If the agencies actually want us to find stuff, first, they gotta get it out there!