Difficult to search

With navigation through the website architecture proving difficult, the performance of the search engine becomes critical for finding information. Online surveys of visitors to Directgov shows 35 per cent of people are unable to find everything they want, this is a high proportion for a site whose key purpose is to help people find what they need, and which costs around £13 million per year to run²⁵.

The search engine on Directgov seems to work reasonably well but can go wrong. Our early testing found the first response to a simple search to find out how to give blood returned an out of date and irrelevant entry from 2004 called ‘Donor ban to protect blood supply’²⁶, this has since been rectified by Directgov so that a more relevant entry appears first. Research from the London School of Economics and Oxford Internet Institute found the Directgov search engine routinely finds over 500-plus results, and, instead of working through the results, people tend to leave the site and go to Google where results are perceived to be better organised²⁷.

An entirely independent demonstration site shows how this works in practice, Directionlessgov (see www.directionlessgov.com) was set up by members of the Democracy.org group and pits the ability of the government site’s internal search engine against Google’s search capability in a site which cost very little time and money to build. The site raises several issues beyond the direct comparison of search engines, not least on cost. It suggests that the internet already has existing tools which people able to use easily to find information that are more effective than Government-procured functions.

This reveals a difficulty – everything is in one place, but it is a confusing place. The question then is, can it deliver added value by giving consumers something more than just a search engine?  Proponents of the service would argue that just to have every public service in one recognisable site is a valuable thing in itself, but we feel that this is not enough on its own and that the emphasis needs to shift from thinking about what the service is to what people want and need from it.

25. Department for Work and Pensions, following FOI request from Consumer Focus 3 April 2009
26. Accessed 31 March 2009
27. Dutton, W.H. and Helsper, E.J., 2007. The internet in Britain. Oxford: Oxford Internet Institute, p.66.