An enthusiastic search engine from the early open data era, imagining that we could look up government activity as easily as everything else online.
New Google imagines a world where government information is as easy to search as Google.
Years later, "New Google" feels like a slightly ridiculous title, but at the time Google was synonymous with finding information quickly and easily. Government information wasn't. New Google searched across government databases—a rogue Data.gov, if you will.
The project emerged from the open-source and civic-tech culture of the early 2010s. Built using open-source code from Thomas Levine and government data portal APIs, it was both a remix and a learning exercise. I created it before working at the real Data.gov and before Google launched Dataset Search.