Will MicroHoo Raise Eyebrows On The Hill?, Congress Daily, Tech Daily Dose, July 29, 2009.

Under the 10-year agreement, Microsoft will acquire an exclusive license to Yahoo's core search technologies, and Microsoft will have the ability to integrate Yahoo search technologies into its existing Web search platforms. Microsoft's new search engine Bing will be the exclusive algorithmic search and paid search platform for Yahoo sites.

While the companies are trying to pitch this as providing more search engine diversity (for advertisers, not users: "advertisers no longer have to rely on one company that dominates more than 70 percent of all search"), it further reduces the options users have to an open, transparent, accountable method of finding information.

Attempts to reauthorize the E-Government Act of 2002 (116 Stat. 2899, Public Law 107–347, Dec. 17 2002) are being held up, apparently because of an amendment that would require federal agencies to conduct privacy impact assessments before using outside contractors to manage personal information.

• Amendment likely to prevent e-gov act reauthorization, By Andrew Noyes, CongressDaily, 12/11/2008.

The bill would also add language to ensure government information is accessible via commercial search engines. (See also: Much Government Information Still Not Searchable on Google, etc.)

Firms Push for a More Searchable Federal Web, By Peter Whoriskey, Washington Post,December 11, 2008; D01.

Here is another article about the problem that commercial search engines have in indexing government information.

Google chief executive Eric Schmidt says that the "vast majority" of U.S. government information is still not searchable or findable. J.L. Needham, Google's manager of public-sector content partnerships, estimates that 1,000 federal government Web sites are inaccessible to search engine crawlers.

A person using one of the search engines, for example, can't find Environmental Protection Agency enforcement actions against a given company, can't discover the picture of a specific ancient Egyptian artifact at the Smithsonian and can't search by name for the details of a Vietnam War casualty.

And for many Web users, if an online item can't be found with a Web search engine, then for all practical purposes it doesn't exist.

What's the problem? Often, it is simply a matter of agency budgets. "[I]nformation technology officials in the federal bureaucracy said that the transition may require significant manpower and that the costs could be large." One official said that "With limited resources as always, it's a little bit hard."

Check out the new search engine wikia search!  It is not only the newest search engine on the block, but also new (and I believe unique) in its values (see Wikia Search Alpha Launched January 7, 2008):

1. Transparency - Openness in how the systems and algorithms operate, both in the form of open source licenses and open content + APIs.
2. Community - Everyone is able to contribute in some way (as individuals or entire organizations), strong social and community focus.
3. Quality - Significantly improve the relevancy and accuracy of search results and the searching experience.
4. Privacy - Must be protected, do not store or transmit any identifying data.

Plus, building on the approach that has made Wikipedia so successful, it allows users to enhance the search engine by contributing to "mini articles" on search terms that will provide short definitions of terms,  help disambiguate similar or identical terms, and provide photos and "see also" references.

Here is the NYT coverage: Wiki Citizens Taking on a New Area: Searching By MIGUEL HELFT Published: January 7, 2008.

Two recent changes for the US government's government search engine, USAsearch.gov:

• In the Advanced Search option, the option to limit a search to federal websites has been removed. USAsearch.gov searches both federal and state websites. An option previously available under the Advanced Search option of "Search In" allowed a researcher to specify that they were only interested in results from federal websites. The option never worked cleanly. I had dubbed it a "leaky limit" because some state website results always seeped in. Now there is no federal-only option. Fortunately, once you have your USAsearch.gov results, the agency-sort option makes it easy to view just those results coming from federal agencies.
• On the plus side of the equation, USAsearch.gov now indexes the USDA Forest Service websites that use the .fed.us domain. Any search engine can limit results to those that have a .gov or .mil domain suffix. But some federal websites are exceptions to that rule, as was the case with www.fs.fed.us. Now your searches will find that Forest Service information. I had often run a search in training classes for information about "remote sensing." It was a good way to show how many agencies were involved with this technology, and to show off the agency sort option. Now I have one more agency showing up in my results!