I don’t think this is quite as egregious a problem as you’re describing it. As I’ve shown, attachments are in fact visible to Legistar’s own built-in search. They’re only “hidden” if you decline to use Legistar’s built-in search. Is it perfect? No.

For the use case of an Ann Arbor citizen who’s interested in following the workings of local government, I think needs are reasonably well, but not perfectly met. (E.g., it would be better if Legistar returned attachments as objects in the search results.) Yes, for the use case of a researcher who’s investigating legislation across several communities, then Google is going to miss Ann Arbor’s Legistar attachments. Perhaps there are other, more common use cases whose needs are also not well served.

As I see it, either Google does not want to index any deeper than the agenda items themselves, or Google is not able to do so, because of something about the architecture of Legistar’s information. Maybe Google should be blamed, or maybe the software engineers who made Legistar should be blamed, or maybe there’s actually some simple straightforward switch that can be thrown in the city’s implementation of Legistar that will invite Google’s spiders to index the attachments.

There are certainly other aspects of Legistar that could be improved. An example that comes easily to mind – because we’d like to have icalendar data feeds for The Chronicle’s event display – is the fact that the Legistar calendaring module does not generate a URL for icalendar compliant event data. As a result, someone at the city has to do double data entry for Legistar events and for the Google-based event calendar maintained by the city.

My understanding is that the city is currently working with Granicus, the entity that now owns Legistar, on some upgrades and improvements to the city’s implementation – while mulling the possibility of eventually changing vendors. The potential step of changing vendors, as I understand it, is probably a very long way off – and that would bring along with it the challenges of migrating all that Legistar data into a different piece of software. But if you think that visibility to search engines of all information stored in the system should be a priority, then the time is probably ripe for conveying that to the city.

Council produces a set of PDFs and other documents in support of a meeting. Those documents are hidden in Legistar, out of the eyes of Google search. You can’t even download all of them in any straightforward way that I have seen and host them yourself.

I take that back – there is some code on github called “Councilmatic” that eats everything in a municipal Legistar system and provides a modern user interface for it. See [link]

or

[link]

It’s running in Philadelphia.

Well, that’s obviously wrong, because Legistar returns 14-0572 as a result even with the quotes.

What I missed is that you were doing a Google site-specific search on Legistar, and your complaint is not about Legistar’s search, but about the invisibility of attachments to Google. So perhaps Google doesn’t want to look any deeper than the agenda items, or is not able to look deeper.

I meant to be describing Legistar’s own search box – which is what I use when I’m looking for something on Legistar. It lets you sort results by “final action” which is sometimes handy. And you can narrow the scope of the search by year at the outset, if you have an idea of what year you’re looking for.

Do a search like this, for one of the members of the Downtown Area Citizens Advisory Council, whose name is in the minutes of the meetings on this week’s agenda:

site:a2gov.legistar.com “Stephan Trendov”

You’ll get zero results, even though his name is in the attachments to 14-0572

[link]

While Legistar does not return attached files separate items in the search results, I _believe_ Legistar searches of Legislation are sensitive to the content of attachments. That is, if an attachment has a target term, it will return the agenda item to which that attachment is attached. If you search Legislation for February 28, 2014 it will turn up this item: [link]. But that’s because that string is in one of the attachments, not because the string is in the body of the agenda item itself. Still you’re give no clue which attachment. So you have to open up each attachment and check. So Legistar search should be improved so that the objects that Legistar returns in its search results include attachments, not just agenda items.