Before examining the technical barriers to searching government information or proposing solutions, it is instructive to illustrate what type of information is missing today from the viewpoint of Internet users.
Below, we set out a number of typical scenarios that would lead a individual to search for government information and show the data sources that remain hidden after thorough searches, because agencies have not taken the requisite steps to open them to indexing.
Often the agencies mentioned operate tens or hundreds of dynamic databases that cannot be indexed and searched. This is not a comprehensive list of agencies with non-searchable, but useful, content. We have chosen these examples to illustrate the usefulness of some of the resources that are currently inaccessible.
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