I have been hearing a lot lately about how we are facing a mortgage crisis of huge proportions. Lenders have overextended themselves with high risk, variable interest rate loans and now people are defaulting on loans in droves. There is a lot of talk about how the extent of this problem is so bad, markets could collapse. A crisis, n'est pas?

As a follower of the presidential campaigns, of course I wondered what the candidates were saying about this serious crisis facing America. So I went to all of their websites to search for what I needed to know. I found some information on Dennis Kucinich's, John Edwards', and a wee bit on Barack Obama's sites. But I found something I did not expect to find.

No search!

One of the coolest things about the Web is it that you can search for ANY piece of information you desire and usually you can find it. Face it, Google and Yahoo don't rule the web because they tell you what they think you should know. They give you what you want to know.

So you would think the candidate websites would provide a search tool so we can find out what the candidates say about the issues that concern us. That they would want to serve the needs of the voters they court.

Nope.

Well, to be fair, Edwards, Gravel, Kucinich, McCain, and Romney all have a built in search tool on their websites. None of the others do.

Don't the others want us to be able to be able to learn about their policy positions? ABout the positions WE care about? Apparently not? They want to spoon feed us what they think we should know.

I wonder if they realize we could just use Google's advance search tool and restrict our queries to a candidate's specific domain and find the information we want? For example, I used Google to find information about Clinton's position on the mortgage crisis. Perhaps they think that is what we all will do. But does everyone know how to do that? And even if we do, why should we have to go to another website to search a candidate's website?

But still, I am hung on the perception issue. Sure, we can always use Google's advanced search function. But how hard is it for the campaign to put that Google search tool on their own website? Or how about flipping the search function switch on in their Content Management System (CMS). It really is that easy to add search. Not to have it has to be a conscious decision by the campaign.

To me, if candidates are making it unnecessarily hard to find information on their websites, I feel like they are hiding something. Either that or they don't really care about what voters need.

Voters need information about candidates to make informed voting decisions. That is the way our elections are supposed to work. In principal, at least, free markets (of goods or ideas) require perfect information. Websites without search do not provide perfect information. Its like burying a document in the middle of a warehouse of filing cabinets. Even if it is there, in effect it might as well not be.

Search tools can give us the access to information we need. There is no practical reason not to provide them. So why don't all the candidates give us the information we need?