The President announced on June 24 that within 90 days, the government will create a new web site, FirstGov, that will serve as a portal to government information. The web site is based on web.gov, a project conceived of by the General Services Administration (GSA), but FirstGov will be powered by a search engine designed and donated by a private citizen. On June 24, President Clinton announced that, within 90 days, the government will create a new web site, FirstGov, that will serve as a portal to government information. The web site is based on WebGov, a project conceived of by the General Services Administration (GSA). To complement the portal, Eric Brewer— the co-founder of search engine company Inktomi (which provides the search engines behind such sites as Yahoo, AOL, Microsoft MSN, and HotBot), and a professor of computer science at the University of California-Berkeley — offered to build, free of charge, a database of all government documents on the Internet, and Brewer will lead a team to provide an in-depth, fast search engine for the portal to complement the database. Brewer intends to extend his knowledge of search engines to provide a free service to the public — i.e., with no cost and no banners ads. Users will also be able to use the site anonymously unless they opt-in to specialized services in the future. Brewer's first step will be to provide massive indices of all government information currently on the web. As a result, according to the White House, FirstGov will be able to search one billion documents in less than one-quarter of a second and will be able to handle at least 100 million searches a day. The goal of FirstGov is to make all online information published by the federal government available through one web site. Overall, FirstGov is likely to be a powerful new tool to search government's more than 20,000 web sites in an efficient, economical manner. OMB Watch has long advocated for a free government portal. The plan is that if a person types in "savings bonds," the service would link her directly to the government Web site that lets people buy savings bonds — instead of merely listing sites that happen to have the words "savings bonds" embedded in them. The service will not have context-sensitive search capability, however. Thus, if our person types in "boards," she may get sites for lumber as well as for boards of directors. In order to make these kinds of distinctions, a thesaurus or taxonomy of terms (much like subject headings in a library catalog) would be needed, and there is no plan to create this tool. It should also be understood that the service will not provide access to all government information. It will not provide direct access to numeric databases, nor will it serve as a tool for compliance with E-FOIA since most of the records (as opposed to the publications) of government are not available through the Internet today. The portal will be managed by the GSA with monies that various agencies have agreed to contribute — at least initially. More specifically, the President's Management Council will oversee operations. The database and search engine will be managed by a nonprofit organization that Brewer plans to create. The relationship between the nonprofit and the government is still being worked out.