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 nology is rather than just commenting, people are collaborating and finding ways to compromise.

Chairman. Yes, good point.

Mr. . And so, there are some very practical problems, of course, that are faced with open commenting, spammers, crazy people, and all kinds of bad behaviors. And you have to think how do you balance the desire for allowing the general public to comment and not to censor their remarks because maybe somebody does not agree with them versus well it is not censorship to say, links to Viagra advertisements is not really a comment on most regulations, anyway.

And so, I think that these things do take very careful study. People can be very simplistic and say well they, should allow the public to comment on regulations. Well, sure. But how are we going to help the public to come in as a part of a responsible community and do that in a way that everyone finds useful.

Chairman. Good, thoughtful answer. Mr. Needham, any thoughts about this question about how we can improve basically Regulations.gov?

Mr. . Well, you are correct, that this is an example of an E–Government program website, among the many that I have referred to, that are not visible to search engine users. And this, I think, is more of a comment on the USA.gov discussion earlier, that let us say that someone is a farmer that grows tomatoes in Florida is not too plugged into the regulatory process that governs that industry and searches on Google for ‘‘tomatoes transport.’’ If this resource were crawled and indexed and integrated in search engines, including USA.gov, this grower might be more engaged in that regulatory process, learn that there is, in fact, a rule that is under comment.

And the point being made here is that not every citizen realizes when they are looking into their health, their business, education, or housing, that government provides a service that is relevant. And that is why it is critical that all of the information of the Federal Government that is public be in all search engines possible and not simply through USA.gov, where a user is consciously looking for information from its government.

Chairman. Well said. Mr. Schwartz.

Mr. . I want to take on two different points there, the first one that Mr. Needham just raised. In terms of when we first did our report looking at what kinds of searches were not coming up, it was during the polar bear comment period that the Interior Department was having, that had more comments than any other commentary.

Chairman. Whether the polar bear was going to be listed as an endangered species?

Mr. . Exactly. And we did some searches on that and you could not find that on any search engine at all. It was one of the first things that really got us interested in this issue. This was one of the best known comment periods in the history of the Federal Government. I mean, the most activity in terms of comments and you could not find it on a search engine, except for going through secondary parties. And part of that was because it was not on Regulations.gov.