Let there be search. And it was par.

It's still going through some development and cleaning up but for the most part, there is now a central search engine for websites of the Government of Jamaica. It's very vanilla and I don't think much will change in the short term but for a first incarnation I wont complain. It functions. It does standard keyword match searches and while I think that this really is a paradigm straight from the 80's , as of this writing we really have nothing better that's anything more than a good theory.

This site forms the base of the overall Web Presence strategy being developed by the government. In essence, they're lining up all the blocks then building up the skyscraper. The other pillar currently on the ground is the GoJ Web Portal, which right now is just a hierarchy link page but will soon be transformed into a service centric portal, and the use of the domain to provide value added services to GoJ employees (GoJ email, for example, to persons in organizations that do not have the internal capacity, competence, budget or time to deploy enterprise level mail).

In the end, this revamped approach and renewed vision of web presence is a promising sign that the Government of Jamaica has finally matured to the concept and opportunities availed by the internet and is finally moving to leverage this tool to empower themselves and the citizens of Jamaica.