When looking for political and public policy information using typical search engines, we too often become frustrated with the irrelevant results we have to wade through in order to get to the information that we need. So when Google announced it would let people build a customized search engine that searches only the websites you are interested in, we became intrigued by the possibility and went to work. Over many months and many late nights, we collected over 3,200 political and public policy websites and built this customized search engine. After testing it out we found this new tool to be very useful in finding information on the web and wanted to share it with everyone working in this arena, so we had a friend help us build this website. We hope you find it useful as well.

One of the most unique features this tool offers is that in addition to performing searches that weed out the irrelevant results, users can further filter their searches by utilizing one of the customized “refinements” that you will see at the top of each result page. By clicking on any of these refinements you will be given results only from these types of websites:

• Federal Government - search only federal government and federal elected official websites
• State Government - search only state government and state elected official websites
• Local Government - search only local government and local elected official websites
• Policy Organizations - search only websites of policy organizations (think tanks, advocacy organizations, etc.)
• Old and New Media – search only websites of media outlets, including mainstream media outlets and blogs

While we think this search engine is useful, we need your help to make this the best political and policy resource on the web? Are we missing websites that should be included in this search engine? Are there additional filters that you would find useful? Please let us know.

Finally, you are probably wondering about the name Polisphere. There is a wealth of political and policy information on the Internet, and this search engine is meant to help people find the information they are looking for in this sphere more efficiently. Thus, the name. We hope you find it useful. Enjoy.