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Dawn Pointer McCleskey

Latest content by Dawn Pointer McCleskey

Search.gov 2021 Year In Review

Search.gov 2021 Year In Review—This report explores the top needs of 2021, expressed in the public’s own words. In addition to topics common every year, this year for the first time we explored the topic of infrastructure, and took a look at public searching behaviors. For each of the 18 topics, this report provides the top 25 searches in that topic, trend data since 2019, and the top websites serving the public in that area.— via Search.gov

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Feb 22, 2022

Search.gov: 2019 in Review

In 2019, Search.gov served 295,916,305 queries across more than 2,000 government websites. Find out more in their annual report, including the most common topics that people searched for.— via Search.gov

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Jan 27, 2020

Dear Search: Reading Between the Lines of Search Data

Welcome to the first Dear Search article, an occasional series where the DigitalGov Search team addresses common search questions. Dear Search, Right now, I am building up user research services that can be offered to product owners on a regular or as-needed basis. So, being able to look at search trends and offer advice to

Oct 21, 2016

Let’s Encrypt Those CNAMES, Shall We?

This is post 4 in the 5-part series, The Right Tools for the Job: Re-Hosting DigitalGov Search to a Dynamic Infrastructure Environment. This post references the previous posts frequently, so please read those before reading this one if you haven’t done so already. In addition to the DNS challenges created by offering “masked” domains such

Sep 07, 2016

Quality, Speed, and Lower Costs: Yes, You Can Have It All

This is post 2 in the 5-part series The Right Tools for the Job: Re-Hosting DigitalGov Search to a Dynamic Infrastructure Environment. The last major infrastructure upgrade that DigitalGov Search had was in 2010. Not only has technology evolved significantly since then, but so have business models for right-sizing costs. Moving to Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Sep 02, 2016

The Right Tools for the Job: Re-Hosting DigitalGov Search to a Dynamic Infrastructure Environment

This is the first post of a 5-part series. DigitalGov Search is a commercial-grade search engine provided as a shared-service by the United States General Services Administration. We power about 2,300 search configurations for hundreds of federal, state, and local government agencies. Using our platform, agencies can easily configure a search experience for the public that

Aug 18, 2016

Mobilegeddon: Government Edition

Much is being said and written about the coming Mobilegeddon/Mopocalypse on April 21st—the day Google’s ranking algorithm will begin boosting results for mobile-friendly sites and penalizing mobile-unfriendly sites. While some agency websites are mobile-friendly, a great many are not. We will do well to pay attention—almost 25% of traffic on government websites is coming from

Apr 15, 2015