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 to, instead of clicking on something that says Alabama, someone would have to type in Alabama and the search crawler is not able to figure out what to type there.

But we actually find even in the Wikipedia context, which is written by human beings, that there are some websites that even when you type in the right thing and you submit and you get the information you want, you cannot link directly to that. And so someone who is writing something, trying to explain something, and they want to link to a particular statute or a particular regulation or a particular piece of information that has been published by the government, if they are not able to cut and paste that URL and put it into Wikipedia, then even with a human involved it is very frustrating. The only thing you can do is give someone instructions. Go to this page, type in this, select the third link. It can be very frustrating.

Chairman. That is a good point. Ms. Evans, do you want to respond?

Ms. . Well, all I can say is that we are very open to making this more collaborative. We have examples, and I would like to actually share one, that we are embracing this technology and we are using it more ourselves. The EPA was raised as an example here of not making information available. But they recently held what they called the Puget Sound Partnership where they went and for 36 hours they worked directly out there trying to figure out how to do the information, using the technology. What parts of their information were not easily accessible? Could they set up these pages? Could they do all that?

We are taking those lessons learned there. Molly O’Neill from EPA, the CIO from EPA is sharing that now with the other CIOs. So that we can take these types of things and the frustration of the information that we are putting out there and then try to fix it so that we can make sure that it is readily available.

Chairman. OK. That is an encouraging example.

As you know, Section 204 of the E–Government Act required the development of an official Internet portal that would be organized by function or topic instead of the boundaries of agency jurisdiction. That is USA.gov which now receives, I gather, almost 1.9 million visits per week.

I wanted to ask you if you have done any work that would enable you to tell us how you think a user’s experience is enhanced by using USA.gov instead of attempting to find their information through search engines?

Ms. . Well, the way that USA.gov is set up—GSA really manages this very well, at least we think they manage it very well. They do hold user focus groups constantly throughout the year to really measure the customer experience, the citizen experience and how to reorganize it.

This is a good example of us and our interpretation of putting the context around the Federal Government information and then trying to give the citizen an enriched experience when they come and that it is the authoritative source for the Federal Government launching off of there, that you are going to authoritative sites.

They did a lot of market research, it used to be called FirstGov.gov. They did research just in the name itself and