26th
just walk a couple hundred meters …
I have been told more than once that if I want to escape the summer crowds at any national park in the US that all I really need to do is walk a little more than a couple of hundred meters from the parking lot. The reason, as it has been explained to me, is that most americans tend not stray that far.
This link goes to a post that effectively asks that if your, and in this case it is the government’s data does not appear on the first page of the search results does it really exist.
The point being that as most government departments are putting their data online that they should do so in a manner that is friendly to search engines as the effort will be mostly wasted if no one is able to find the data. And, as most people do not go past the first page …
While I think there are some good points I think there are more interesting arguments for trying to get the data up in search engine friendly formats in that it should be easier to do cross site mining if there are reasonaly common interfaces and naming schemes. (The post has an excellent example of how bad the census data is for this which is too bad because that would be a very interesting dataset to play with).
