NEWS: New government portal

Convera Corporation (a Vienna, VA-based provider of search technologies) has announced a release of a free government search portal named "Govmine". The tool (currently in a beta-version) became a third player in the government portal market following FirstGov (powered by Microsoft's MSN Search and Vivisimo's Clusty) and Google's U.S. Government Search. It is designed to serve the needs of government knowledge workers (unlike FirstGov, for example, which caters to citizens).

Govmine uses Convera's platform already installed in many federal agencies. As FCW notes, Govmine's results are based on pattern recognition and semantic technology (in contrast to Google's ranking system, which analyses links among Web sites to determine an individual page's value).

FCW also points out (quoting Kurt Gastrock, Convera's chief operating officer) that Convera has experience with efficiently categorizing search results for government professionals. For example, an employee searching for "serotonin" would see the results categorized in the following order:

-- Diseases and pathological conditions (25,547 results)
-- Treatment (21,618 Results)
-- Symptoms (2,612 Results)
-- Side effects (9,693 results)
-- Drug toxicity (864 results)
-- Food and drug recalls (9 results)

One question here is how this new offering will work with the agencies' existing investments in Convera products - that is, is it intended to compliment or substitute these investments in any way?

Technorati tags: United States, Federal Government, Information Management, Enterprise Search, Search Engines, Information Technology