Vivisimo has been awarded a government contract to provide search technology to the U.S. government's FirstGov.gov portal, with MSN Search playing a major role, writes SearchEngineWatch. Vivisimo plans to use its own crawling technology for focused/targeted crawls of some federal and local government material, then combine those results with MSN results. FirstGov will offer new features, including government-wide news and image search so that users won't have to visit individual agency sites to find resources.