Visitors of the Dutch government’s website rijksoverheid.nl are searching the most for the term “doing business with”. Between 2011 and 2016 this term was used in the government’s search engine more than 5 million times. Other terms that were searched most were “euro”, “research+justice”, “tax”, “vacation”, “divorce’ and “violence”. Open State Foundation requested this dataset through the law on re-use of government information. The government provided per year the 5000 most entered search terms. The data consists of 9.315 unique terms that were searched for some 51 million times. The Ministry of General Affairs keeps data on search terms from September 1, 2011 until today.
In 2016 the most searched terms were “OR”, “reisadvies”, “ouderschapsverlof”, “paspoort”, “wmo”, “transitievergoeding”, “turkije”, “vog” en “vacatures”. In 2015 these were “onderzoeken+justitie”, “china”, “kinderopvang”, “vakantie”, “maatschappelijke+stage”, “nota+mobiliteit”, “jeugd”, “sexueel+geweld”, “cultureel+erfgoed” and “q-koorts”. In 2014 next to “onderzoeken+justitie”, “vakantie”, “maatschappelijke+stage”, “nota+mobiliteit” and “q-koorts” also “jeugd”, “kinderopvang” and “zaken+doen+met” were the most searched terms.
Open State Foundation did the request because we wanted to know what information on what subjects people are looking for at the government’s website. A lot of governments struggling with ways to prioritise active disclosure and the release of public data. The first thing to look at is the information people are looking for at government websites. This overview gives an interesting insight and indication of which datasets on what topics should be made public actively.
Search your own terms on rijksoverheid.nl
Data
Because data that is requested through FOIA requests are not made public via the government’s own dataportal or via the government’s own website (on which all documents that are made public through a FOIA request are published in PDF), we have made the data available through our own dataportal which includes a combined dataset (csv) as well as the raw data.