Plain Language, www.plainlanguage.gov
This site promotes the use of 'plain English' to help citizens better understand the workings of the government. After installing a sitemap, their examples of 'plain' and 'obfuscated' language are now high results on Google, and the site is the top result for the "Plain Language" search. The site has seen an increase in traffic, and as new content is added, the sitemap is regenerated in order to reflect the new content.
Energy Department's Office of Science and Technology Information, www.osti.gov
OSTI makes available the research of the Department of Energy and cites sharing this information with the American people as central to its mission. When OSTI implemented the Sitemap protocol several years ago, the increase in traffic directed to the site was immediate. "The first day that Yahoo offered up our material for search, our traffic increased so much that we could not keep up with it," OSTI Director Walt Warnick said.
Education Department's National Center for Education Statistics, nces.ed.gov
The NCES provides statistical information on educational facilities. The Webmaster created a sitemap for five previously uncrawlable databases. Search engines are now indexing NCES and sending their traffic to the latest statistical data, and users now find the original source of the information.
Library of Congress American Memory project, memory.loc.gov
The Library of Congress' American Memory project is a vast collection of American historical sources and objects. Before implementing the Sitemap protocol, this powerful resource was not available to people using third-party search engines. Today, much of the collection is fully indexed and reachable via search engine queries.
State websites partnering with Google
The governments of Arizona, California, Utah, and Virginia have partnered with Google to make searching for their materials easier online using the Sitemap protocol. This has made a great deal of state government content available to the American public.
Many other sites are working toward making their content more accessible to search engines, and thus the general public. For example, USAJobs.gov just made available a feed of vacancy announcements, giving major search engines access to this previously uncrawlable information. In this ongoing process, we applaud those agencies making their information available.
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