USA.gov began in 2000 when Internet entrepreneur Eric Brewer, whose early research in parallel computing was funded by the United States Department of Defense, offered to donate a powerful search engine to the government.

In June 2000, President Clinton announced the gift from the Federal Search Foundation, a nonprofit organization co-founded by Brewer and fellow entrepreneur David Binetti, and instructed that the portal be launched in 90 days.

[3] Visitors to USA.gov can sign up for free e-mail alerts in both English and Spanish, to learn about popular government topics and important services and benefits.

The pages' subjects range from benefits, scams, and fraud, and contacting elected officials to hurricane recovery, travel, and jobs.

USA.gov and USAGov en Español offer RSS feeds to help the public stay up to date on useful government information.

"[16] A part of USA.gov, USAGov en Español pulls together all of the U.S. government's Spanish-language websites and makes them easily accessible to the public in one central location.

Although most of the resources shared on USAGov en Español are federal, the site also links to Spanish-language content provided by states, the District of Columbia, the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, and local government websites.

USA.gov has a leadership role on the Interagency Committee on Government Information[17] (ICGI), formed to meet requirements of the E-Government Act of 2002 (Public Law 107-347, 44 U.S.C.

The ICGI drafts recommendations and shares effective practices for federal government information access, dissemination, and retention.

[citation needed] Several years later, in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in August 2005, USA.gov participated in efforts led by the Department of Homeland Security and worked with over 20 federal agencies to develop guidance to communicate response information related to the storm and its aftermath.

The federal web community can now re-use a good deal of the content developed in response to the hurricane crisis, to enable them to be even better prepared when the next disaster occurs.

USA.gov has won numerous awards and media endorsements, including: USAGov en Español was named a finalist for the Arroba de oro, ("the golden @"),[citation needed] has won the Web Content Managers' "Best Practices" award,[citation needed] and consistently scores among the highest in government or private sectors in the American Customer Satisfaction Index.