[Asis-l] Science.gov 2.0 Launched

[Richard Hill]

For immediate release, Thursday, May 20, 2004
Media Contact: Cathey Daniels, (865) 576-9539, danielsc at osti.gov

Interagency science portal delivers significant advance in government
information retrieval 

WASHINGTON, DC - Science.gov (www.science.gov/), the public's "go to" Web
portal for the vast stores of Federal science information, has made
searching for information easier for the user.  At a roll-out on May 11,
Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham launched the new search version of
Science.gov which includes ranking the relevance of results to the users'
question.   

While retaining the content and advances originally unveiled in December
2002, Science.gov 2.0 will search its 47 million pages of government R&D
results and present the results to patrons in relevancy-ranked order. This
new technology sorts through the government's reservoirs of research and
rapidly returns information in an order more likely to meet patrons' needs.

The Web portal is made possible through a collaboration of 12 major science
agencies forming a coalition called the Science.gov Alliance. 

The Department of Energy, which hosts the site through its Office of
Scientific and Technical Information, funded the R&D of a new
relevancy-ranking technology by a company called Deep Web Technologies. The
technology was applied to meta-searches in the deep Web where traditional
search engines cannot go. 

Secretary of Energy Spencer

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Richard Hill
Executive Director
American Society for Information Science and Technology
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