Researching e-government services, I’ve just come across DirectionlessGov, a cheeky little utility that compares results from a search on DirectGov with results from a Google search for the same term on .gov.uk sites. According to the authors, “Our tests show that DirectionlessGov is much more effective at most common searches than DirectGov.” What they mean in fact is that you will generally get a more helpful result set using a Google site search of government sites (ie prefix the search terms with site:gov.uk) than you will by just searching within Directgov.