ArcServer vs Geoserver

Props to Chris Holmes, posting about the work going into making the next version of Geoserver fully crawleable (not a real word! (yet!)) by web spiders, right in synch with Jack Dangermond’s announcement of the same feature coming in ArcServer.

The government here in British Columbia is moving haltingly towards a more service-oriented approach to spatial data publishing, and this has included a strong awareness that being consumable by Google tools, and spidered by search engines is key to improving general accessibility. If the citizen’s first stop in searching for information is Google or MSN, it makes sense to spend some effort ensuring your relevant information is properly exposed via those services.

Free business opportunity: establish button-down search engine optimization firm targeted exclusively at government clients.

Now, why is Google sharing the stage with ESRI? ESRI needs Google’s stamp of approval a lot more than Google needs ESRI’s – what’s in it for Google? Is the Google worried that Virtual Earth is doing better cultivating government application development opportunities than the Google suite? Google plays well with the hacker set, but is a harder sell with the suits than tried-and-true Microsoft, particularly in a big, conservative organizations.