Developed by the U.S. , FDsys' indexes currently hold more than 154,000 documents from eight federal collections, "with additional documents being added daily" according to a GPO press release. Although it's tempting to see FDsys as part of , it has actually been in the works for four years.

FDsys is intended to replace the established repository site by the middle of the year, and it's clearly an improvement. If you've ever used a search engine, you know exactly what to do: type in a word, several words, or a phrase in quotes, or click the Advanced Search button.

While that basic functionality is apparent in the new tool, not everyone is impressed. Commenting on a article about the new site, leewifflestin complained that it was "just like the GPO building itself Old, archaic, and difficult to navigate. I suppose if I was in the business of publishing paper copies, I wouldn't want people finding things easily online either." Another commenter, Fonkyou, asked "Why didn't they just give the docs to Google and let them do it?"

But JJCarpenter1 defended the site. "I found the search engine very easy to use and very powerful -- apparently it's metadata-aware, so it can do much more sophisticated searches than Google allows. It also looks like they built in a nice drilldown feature that lets you find what you're looking for when you don't know what you're looking for."