Politics and Elections Blog
Trends, tools and news from the Google Politics & Elections team
Smarter searching in All for Good
Monday, August 24, 2009
[
All for Good
helps people find ways to volunteer and do good in their communities. Googlers on the public sector team helped build and contribute to the site as a 20% project.]
One of the top concerns we've been hearing from nonprofit organizations who list volunteer opportunities on
All for Good
is that their opportunities aren't updated on the site as frequently as they need. This happens because All for Good doesn't directly receive volunteer opportunities from nonprofits - we
crawl
feeds from partners like
VolunteerMatch
and
Idealist
just like Google web search crawls web pages. Crawlers don't immediately update, they take time to find new information.
Today, we're rolling out improvements to All for Good that will help solve this problem and improve search quality for users. The biggest change, which you won't see directly, is that our search engine is now powered by
SOLR
, an incredible open source project that will allow us to provide higher quality and more up-to-date opportunities. Nonprofits should start seeing their opportunities indexed faster, and users should see more relevant and complete results.
We're also making searching easier by launching categories. When you go to All for Good, you now have the option to search by categories of listings in addition to keywords, making it easier to find opportunities you're interested in. Categorization is just the first of several features we'll be adding in the coming months to help you find interesting ways to give back to your community.
We hope you'll try out
All for Good
and participate in a service activity this summer. If you're interested in helping others do good, you can get involved in All for Good by contributing to our
source code
, developing an application with our
API
, or embedding the
All for Good gadget
on your web site or blog.
Posted by Leon Palm and Eric Hysen, Public Sector Team
Hello, world!
Thursday, August 13, 2009
The Public Sector team got started to build consumer products and applications that connect citizens to public sector information and services. We'll continue work on projects including
Google Moderator
,
voting information
and
All for Good
. And we're exploring new product ideas that meet our mission.
Advances in technology can make it simple for people to stay engaged and informed about their government and their communities. But the public sector rarely has the technology to build appropriate online tools that meet citizen demand. As the public sector works to move services and information online, small external technology teams like ours can provide engineering insight and resources.
While we're ramping up, we're eager to hear your ideas about how an engineering team can build products that make an impact. Leave a comment, and we'll keep the conversation going.
Posted by Ginny Hunt, Public Sector Team
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