Skip to main content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.

Https

Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( ) or https:// means you’ve safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.

Why Choose Search.gov?

Search.gov is a by-government, for-government search engine provided to federal agencies by the General Services Administration. We understand the needs and challenges that government web teams face. We’ve designed our service to meet you where you are.

Highly configurable

No developers required - use our easy interface to design your search experience yourself, including what content to search, recommended content, and the look and feel of your search results page.

Built for government

Because we only engage with government clients, we orient ourselves around your needs, whether it is security, compliance, search results coverage, or the unique circumstances of government web publishing.

Hands-on customer service

Our team of experts is available to help you with your questions, ranging from technical support and troubleshooting to search engine optimization consultations. Your success is our mission.

No barriers to entry

Adopting a new tool or service is often difficult for federal agencies, but getting started with Search.gov is friction free. Our service is ready to use, and does not require interagency agreements, payments, or other common procedural challenges.

There are several key differences between our service and other options in the marketplace. We look forward to working with you!

Feature
Comparison
Search.gov Major Search
Engine Custom
Search
Solr Other Site
Search Tools
Search your
primary domain
Yes Yes Yes Yes
Search additional
domains and servers
Yes Yes No* Yes
Search the full
text of PDFs
Yes Yes No* Depends on
the service
Search USAJOBS
postings
Yes No No No
Search Federal
Register
documents
Yes No No No
Search RSS
feed content
Yes No No No
Search social
media content
(images,
YouTube)
Yes No No No
Is developer
assistance required?
No+ No No* Depends on
the service
Faceted search
and metadata
driven search
Yes++ No Yes Depends on
the service
Relevance Ranking
Control
Planned+++ No No Depends on
the service
Customer service Yes No No Depends on
the service
SEO consultations
available
Yes No No Depends on
the service
Authorized to
Operate
Yes Ask your
CISSO
Ask your
CISSO
Ask your
CISSO
Cost model No cost Query
volume
No cost** Size of index
plus query
volume

* Some features are only available with Solr if you buy a hosted Solr service or you manage a crawler stack in-house

** Solr search is available at no cost for uncustomized, single-website CMS search. Costs are associated with hosted Solr services or development effort.

+ Search.gov allows web teams to manage their search configurations without running changes through developer teams. If you would like to use our Results API to pull results and display them within your website’s template, this would require developer assistance to establish and maintain the API calls, and to design and build the search results page.

++ Faceted search is available via our results API, and will be available on our hosted results page soon.

+++ Our relevance ranking is already tuned to government needs, but we will be adding site-level controls.