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Nearly a quarter of dot-gov domains don’t work, analysis finds

A new study found many government web sites unreachable. It also discovered that more than one-tenth of the sites are unreachable without the “www” prefix.

  • Nearly a quarter of dot-gov domains don’t work, analysis finds, By Joseph Marks, NextGov (09/09/2011).

    An unofficial analysis of the roughly 1,800 top-level federal Web domains shows nearly a quarter of them are now unreachable.

    That may mean those sites have been shut down or that their content has been consolidated into larger sites in accordance with a White House plan to drastically cut the federal Web presence over the coming year, said Benjamin Balter, a new technology fellow at the Federal Communications Commission and graduate student at The George Washington University who designed the analysis tool as a personal project.

    …For simple, run-of-the-mill websites, requiring the “www” prefix typically means the sites are extremely old or unsophisticated. In the case of higher traffic sites such as NASA.gov and FAA.gov it may mean the sites are a complex mesh of public and private information, which makes modernizing the addresses more complicated, Balter said.

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