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 gine results. And I wanted to ask you why, and to expand a bit on what you said. I know you had a reference to EPA and NIH. But is it accidental? Is it that they are not going the extra mile to make this happen? Or is there some policy? Or is it plain laziness that is bringing us to a point where we should not be?

Mr. . Right, happy to speak to that.

So I think the principle factor that we can look to is that governments produce lots of information and have a mandate to disseminate that information. And to do that, agencies rely on large databases to hold public records and present government programs to citizens. So that is one factor, lots of information, hard to disseminate it efficiently.

But these databases, the EPA example I gave and many others that I could point to at the Federal, State, and local level. They typically present to the user a search form by which that user then types in key words to find the report they are seeking, or the record or what have you. These search forms cannot be navigated by search engine crawlers. We cannot reach behind to see what is there and add those records to our index.

And because, as we have experienced in our communication with agencies, they tend not to think as much about how citizens are going about finding information but rather about how their website is presented to citizens, they have not taken, by and large, this step of providing us a means of finding those records behind that search form. And that is what the Sitemap Protocol technology enables. It provides the agency a simple mechanism for pointing out to a search engine crawler, these are all of the records in this database, come here and crawl them.

Chairman. I appreciate the answer. So you have now created a tool that should make it much easier for Federal Government websites to be included in search engine results.

Let me go back to you, Ms. Evans, and ask you if you want to add at all to Mr. Needham’s answer about why some agencies have not made their web pages available to commercial search engines?

Ms. . Well, I think Mr. Needham hit on the first issue about it is a lot of information and therefore we try to figure out the best way to efficiently deliver it, which is through databases and organization that way.

The other part, which Mr. Needham has also highlighted, is the partnership that we need to work out with commercial search capabilities, because many times when we start delivering these next level of services, what we have also done is streamlined the support services associated with those.

So in talking with Google and other search companies, we try to present the information in a context. We may not be doing it in the most efficient way to provide a context around it. For example, on GovBenefits.gov, when we initially talked, we have a whole support mechanism behind that. So we try to filter so that we do not create frustration in the citizen as well and present a whole series of results to them. And what they do is they see what they are basically eligible for.

Now what we need to do is work in partnership, which is what your reauthorization allows us to do, is that there is a balance between us trying to streamline our backline and making sure that