There's an element of data being difficult to find, but it's more surprising that agencies have a tremendous amount of data that they just never thought to proactively put on their websites.
A lot of the gains that we've seen in implementing our open government plan have to do with making available data that used to be available only when someone specifically asked for it, or that was available piece by piece to one individual at a time. It's now available to everyone in bulk. Agencies are reporting that this has tremendously cut back on the number of requests for data that they receive.
The other beauty of having the data available in one spot like on data.gov is that we're seeing people combining data from different agencies and creating new and interesting things. It used to be that the data was held separately at each agency. By putting it all up together in a place where it's matchable, it can all be intertwined, and that's a new element of transparency that we just didn't have before.