GOV.UK site search
Benefits
VAIS generates search results with a high degree of relevance, which is the biggest driver for using this search engine product to power GOV.UK site search. It enables semantic search: the ability for search engines to 'understand' a user's intent when they search for something, and return relevant results. This enables users of GOV.UK site search to search using natural language queries (queries that reflect the way that people actually speak) and get highly relevant results. It is effective at handling misspellings or synonyms - so users do not need to know exact government terminology to get highly relevant results.
Details
- Tool name
- GOV.UK site search
- Organisation
- Department for Science Innovation and Technology
- Status
- live
- AI method (as recorded)
- Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing
- AI method (normalised tags)
- Machine Learning Natural Language Processing
- Usecase
- Search and Retrieval
- Origin
- gov.uk
- Owning team
- GOV.UK Site Search Team
- Date added
- Scrape date
- 23/03/2026
- Source note
- GOV.UK site search is powered by Google Vertex AI Search which uses the family of Gecko embedding models based on neural network architecture for semantic search capabilities. [Source]