About the Labs
What is IRS Labs?
IRS.gov is determined to improve the overall quality of its website and the various services and applications that are used there. To accomplish this goal, we have launched this website as a place where we can test new products and services before using them on the official IRS.gov website.
This is an approach used on many websites throughout the Internet to ensure that web applications are as good as they can be. The idea is a fairly simple one: launch a new product or service and observe how users interact with it. These usage patterns are collected and analyzed to see if users are taking full advantage of the features made available to them or if they are successfully completing the tasks they set out to perform.
Participants who come to this site do not need to do anything special other than simply interact naturally with the products and services they find here as if they were on the official site.
Why are you testing IRS Search?
The mission of the IRS website is to support the primary mission of the IRS: “Provide America's taxpayers top quality service by helping them understand and meet their tax responsibilities and enforce the law with integrity and fairness to all.” The ability with which taxpayers can easily find this information on the website is essential to achieving this mission. In that spirit, we want the IRS Search experience to be as good as it can be since it is an indispensable method of navigation and finding information located on the site.
How am I helping you test IRS Search?
The most important quality of a good search engine is its “relevance.” Relevance can be measured by the search engine’s ability to help you easily find web pages that satisfy your specific information needs by bringing the most useful pages as close to the top of the search results page as possible. We will fine-tune various configuration parameters of our search engine to measure the impact of these changes on overall relevance. As users interact with the search engine to find information on the IRS website, we will gain valuable insights regarding which configurations deliver the most relevant results.
The goal of this IRS Search test is to make it easier to find what you’re looking for on the IRS.gov website.
Why does it seem like the search results change from day to day?
We are testing several different configuration parameters as well as different underlying search technologies. You can expect the search experience to be in a constant state of change. And though the search experience won’t always look or feel the same, your continued use of this site will help us improve the official site.
Why does it seem like the search results on this site are identical to the search results on IRS.gov?
It is quite possible that one of the search configurations we will test will be identical to the results you would see on the official site. This enables us to collect relevance data from the live site that we can compare to our test configurations.
How do I know I can trust this site?
The IRS is very concerned about protecting your privacy and security especially given the many attempts being made by so-called “phishing” sites that may appear to be related to the IRS but they are not.
There are several steps you can take to protect yourself from phishing scams such as always remaining aware of the web address you are actually on. Look carefully at the address in your web browser’s address bar and decide if it’s a legitimate website or simply an attempt to look real. If you look at the web address of this page, you will see that the page is located on http://irs.treasury.gov/ -- an official website of the United States government.
Additionally, be suspicious of websites that are quick to ask you for account information, credit card numbers, social security numbers or any other confidential and personal information unless you are confident you can trust that site.