Google U.S. Government Search, usgov.google.com, is primarily targeted towards government employees and is intended to "replicate its mainstream consumer success at the local, state and federal levels." Google Gov has a customizable interface and offers users the ability to search for public documents and government and commercial new sources. Users can configure the layout of the page and add content to the site from a searchable directory that includes information on government and general topics. News from other web sites can be added using RSS feeds. "Google is promising that its product will make government employees more productive, and give the public better access to government services."

The FDA and the National Park Service are among those already using Google search solutions. What will be interesting is how the Department of Health and Human Services, CDC, FedStats, and other sites frequently used by medical libraries will work with Google Gov. A possibly more interesting question is how would information from sites like NIH, NLM, MedlinePlus, and PubMed be retrieved in Google Gov ? I briefly did a rough test by looking up flu. The term flu did retrieve things from the CDC, MedlinePlus, and many other government sites including state government sites. If there were any results retrieved from PubMed in my quick and dirty Google Gov flu search they were listed well past the first 5 result pages. However, I think it does pick up PubMed results. I did a quick and dirty advanced search on flu limited to only results from ncbi.nlm.nih.gov and I did retrieve a bunch of PubMed citation results. These were quick and dirty searches, so those of you who are more knowledgeable about search engines, Google, and searching can explore this much further and to more intelligently than I. Obviously Google Gov is not the best way to look for PubMed articles but since they (Google) said that it was a search engine to provide better access to government data and services, I was just curious as to how it would perform with the different types of medical information produced by or available from the government.

Government employees aren't the only beneficiaries of Google Gov. Consumers are considered a secondary target user group of the search service. JupiterResearch Analyst Sapna Satagopan was interviewed by TechNewsWorld believes both the legal industry and the medical industry could find Google of value in its ability to search across internal databases. Satagopan said, "Google is looking at a particular niche audience and I can see how it could get other industries thinking about similar services."

Legal Google and Google Med?!? ....Hmmmm I am not too sure.