• WashingtonPost.com, Friday, December 12, 2008 6:16 PM

Google, Microsoft and Yahoo want to make content on U.S. government Web sites searchable. About 1,000 of them are inaccessible to search engine crawlers, according to Peter Whoriskey, citing stats from J.L. Needham, Google's manager of public-sector content partnerships.

You can't search by name for enforcement actions on any given company at the Environmental Protection Agency, pictures of specific ancient Egyptian artifact at the Smithsonian, or details of a Vietnam War casualty, Whoriskey writes. That's because the U.S. government has been unwilling or unable to make millions of its Web pages accessible by searching online.

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