Google Seeks to Crawl All Over Federal Sites

So I'm officially liveblogging the Excellence in Government from the Washington Convention Center. This morning, acting at least partly out of self-interest, I sat in on a session led by JL Needham of Google about the agency's company's ongoing effort to try to convince agencies to open up their Web sites to search engine crawlers (not just Google's, Microsoft's and Yahoo's, too). Needham made his case by showing that Google searches using the terms "statistician jobs government" and "disaster housing government" turned up little, if any, relevant information from federal sites. Walter Warnick of the Energy Department's Office of Scientific and Technical Information and Brand Niemann, a Web services specialist at the Environmental Protection Agency, both noted that they've adopted the Sitemaps tool that Google is pushing.