I wrote a little while ago about how council’s websites might look, and ventured the idea that perhaps all that is needed is a big search box.
Look what Cheltenham Borough Council have got now!
OK, so it isn’t the home page, but it has extra use as it searches other local sites too.
Great work. If anyone knows the folk behind this stuff, can you make sure they come along to LocalGovCamp? 
I don’t think this works because you need to provide several routes to content. The results page also doesn’t tie into the site hierarchy except at the very top level. Plus there’s no advanced search link on the opening search page.
Search is a hard thing to make work every time – look at how crap the BBC’s search is. Whenever I’ve done user testing I’ve found a spread of preferred routes through. Deliberately restricted users are pissed off users.