By jajacobs | August 24, 2006
GovMine is a new search engine that might become useful in searches for data and statistics. Features that look particularly promising:
- categorized grouping of search results, including a category “Statistical Data” (try this sample search). I didn’t find this category frequently, but its appearance at all is tantalizing!
- a search of .gov sites
- relevance ranking (which they make a point of being different from “popularity”)
- boolean search operators
- “disambiguation” hints
An article (Convera releases beta of gov’t search engine) says that it is an “engine designed to help U.S. government workers find relevant information within the glut of data on the Internet” and that it " uses similar pattern-recognition and semantic analysis that Convera created for its database search software used by several U.S. agencies." Another (Convera debuts search portal for government professionals) says that the company that makes this tool “expects to launch a finished version by the end of the fiscal year.”
Thanks to Peggy Garvin, an independent information professional (aka librarian) based in Washington, DC, who alerted me to this interesting tool! (GovMine on the Subway)
– jajacobs