Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Ater spending several chapters encouraging you to get more detailed in
your searches, I'm going to back up and ask you to get more general.
Describe in a word or two what you want. If you're looking for census
data, type census . If you're looking for information on Alaskans, type
Alaskans . If you're looking for information from a particular state, include
the state name.
I've found that the underlying descriptions of the agencies are adequate,
so just doing a general search usually locates the information I want. Even
though FirstGov ofers a huge amount of data, it's still a very small data
pool compared to the entire Web. You may have to do a little experimenting
to ind what you want, but I don't think inding the agency or department
relevant to your interests will take long.
Trapping department-level information
As you move between diferent department homepages, you'll discover two
things: the departments do not have a common design and they vary a lot
in their trap-worthiness. Let's look at the Department of Agriculture, for
example ( Figure 7.23 ).
Figure 7.23
The Usda Web site. 
notice the news is 
located in the middle of 
the page.
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