Microsoft's new Bing decision engine is now powering the search function on the Washington state portal, Access Washington.In a statement released today, Jim Albert, Deputy Director of Operations at the Washington State Department of Information Services (DIS), said "Adding Bing to Access Washington will improve the relevancy of search results on the portal, allowing users to find the information they are looking for faster and with greater accuracy." The statement also says the change to Bing comes "an no additional cost to Washington taxpayers."
The announcement comes the same week that Microsoft and Yahoo! unveiled plans to join forces and use Bing to take on search giant Google. Indeed, Google and its search appliance enjoy high adoption even among state portals in the tricky business of getting search right.
For its part, Washington state was early to use a third party to create a better search experience. It originally contracted with the parent company of ask.com to allow users to get answers to questions asked in everyday, natural language, as well as traditional keyword searching. As a cousin to AskJeeves, the only state named for an individual named its search function AskGeorge in honor of its namesake president.
In an unrelated conversation last night, newly appointed state CIO and DIS director Tony Tortorice told me, "the governor is serious about government reform and we're going to get it done." That apparently includes getting it done in big ways -- implementing enterprise shared services and building a new $300 million data center -- and in smaller ways, like going bing.