GOV.UK — the best place to find government services and information?
A while ago, I came across this video. In it, an earnest civil servant from the Government Digital Service explains that the search function on GOV.UK is important because it is used by 4% of visitors to the site. My brain is obviously wired up differently than hers, because what I took away from that was that 96% of the time, I can get to the page I want directly from Google.
In fairness, GOV.UK gets quite a lot of traffic, so that 4% actually equates to two million searches per month. So can GOV.UK Search help the citizen find content that Google cannot? I decided to put it to the test by searching for five random government services. Okay, it wasn’t quite random — they were the first five that I could think of. I don’t know what that says about me!
“declare a vehicle off the road”
Google nails this one. The very first search result is page I am after.
GOV.UK Search fares okay too, but less well than Google. The page I am looking for is the second result to be returned. One-nil to Google.
“file for divorce”
Once again, the first result returned by Google is the one that we are after. But I did have to scroll down past a sponsored result for quickie-divorce.com to get to it. A little tasteless if I may say so.
GOV.UK Search also returned the correct page as the first result. But the other results returned by GOV.UK Search were a bit… er…interesting. Also in the top five were, “Register for and file your Self Assessment tax return” and “File your confirmation statement (annual return) with Companies House. There’s no indication as to which of these three services is the most painful to use. I have my own suspicions.
We’ll call this one a draw.
“pay tv licence”
The TV Licence is technically not a “government” service. The fee is collected by the BBC in its alter ego as the UK’s TV Licensing Authority. It is then paid into the government’s consolidated fund before being appropriated back to the BBC and other services like S4C.
Technicalities aside, one of the central ideas behind creating GOV.UK in the first place was that the citizen should not have to know how government works to use government. And the TV Licence definitely falls into that category.
So how did GOV.UK Search fare? Not well. The tenth (oh dear) result was a page which contained some information on TV Licences and and a link to page I was actually looking for.
And Google? First result, of course.
“register a herd of pigs”
Okay, yes, this one might sound a bit niche to most people. But I have included it because I have genuinely had occasion to search for it in the last five years. In GOV.UK Search’s top five results are is our old favourite “Register for and file your Self Assessment tax return” and also “Register your vehicle as off the road (SORN)”.
My IP address should have firmly located me in England, so it’s disappointing that the page for registering a pig in Scotland came up before the one for registering a pig in England & Wales.
“apply for lasting power of attorney”
Both Google and GOV.UK Search return the relevant page as the first result. If I had also happened to need to renew my passport, GOV.UK Search would have saved me so time here too. But as it happens, I didn’t need to do that.
GOV.UK claims to be “the best place to find government services and information”. But it isn’t: Google is. Or maybe Bing is — I didn’t check.
Without a doubt, GOV.UK is has transformed publishing in government. It’s won design awards, and deservedly so. I remain undecided about whether I agree with the point that service users do not know (and do not need to know) with which branch of government they are interacting. If I want to tax my herd of pigs I go the DVLA, and if I want to register my car I go to Defra. [That’s not right, is it?]
But government should do only those things which government can do. The Government Digital Service is not going to out-Google Google. And it probably should not bother wasting too much taxpayers money trying.
