EP 74: From Search as a Service: The Future of AI in Government featuring Erik Arnold

When we first started, um...

And like I said, um, you know, well, USA d- well, FirstGov, you know, before it was usa.gov, really started with, with a search capability that was donated.

Um, and so search has been part of the usa.gov family, uh, for, for a long time.

And then when we started kind of expanding it and maturing it and, and everything, um, and, and I was always...

Well, from your standpoint, why is it important for the public to be able to search for government information?

I think, and I think we probably agree on this point from our time there, is that, um, there were numerous studies run, and they're still, still get run, I'm sure, and that the public does not know where government information lives.

Right.

Like, the, the classification of which agency does what is, is very, uh, inside baseball to the general public.

So they don't know-

Right

... where the information resides.

Uh, they do expect, uh, commercial, I would say, quality if there's a gap, and, uh, they're primarily focused on, on services.

And so search technologies are really the only way to, to bridge, you know, that gap.

And, and so for USA.gov, uh, you know, passports and copyright and patents, you know, all of those span different agencies, um, unbeknownst to, uh, the end user.

And so search is a good way to at least click and get them to the right place in terms of the old-school search way of thinking in this AI age.

Yeah.

Well, and if you, if you think about...

I mean, we know that the majority of government websites, um, get their... people find the information on the websites through commercial search engines, right? So, um, and then, you know, it, it gives you all of these links that you can navigate through or go, um, you know, agency by agency.

And, uh, you know, I agree with you 100%, you know, people didn't even know at that time that their driver's licenses came from the state government versus-

Right

... literally the federal go- go- uh, government.

So, uh, just people having under- an understanding.

And I think from the experience perspective, just getting people to where they want to go to be able to get the information or conduct the transaction that they wanna conduct has always been, you know, a, a, a main driver, as well as getting authoritative government information, right? We did some, some work where if you searched for, you know, space information on Google, you would get, you know, green men and Mars, and if you went onto, you know, USA.gov and searched, you would get NASA information.

So being able, for all ages, to be able to get to, and, and put that kind of boundary around information so that they could get to authoritative govern- government information was always important to me in that they got the information, um, that was, was correct and accurate.

And of course, we know that there's probably, uh, agencies that have different answers to the same question, so that, that's a, that is a problem.