"Connecting citizens with their government by offering the public better access to public sector information and services is consistent with our broader vision," said Eric Schmidt, Google's chairman and CEO, "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. These partnerships are among many that Google is pursuing with government agencies to better serve the public.” Currently much public information on state government web sites is not accessible using search engines. Even though the information is on-line, it is not organized in a way search engines can index. The new partnerships are adding large amounts of useful public information from government web sites to search engines such as Google and Yahoo. "These people have search religion. Their site search tools are well designed, but they lack awareness of the site as a search engine target," noted J.L. Needham, Google's manager of public sector content partnerships.
The partnership between Google and the states of California, Virginia, Utah and Arizona uses free software and advising to help state governments improve access to public records currently hidden away in difficult to access areas of their web sites. The partnership is part of a plan by Google to offer the same help to other states and federal government agencies.
California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger said, "California state government provides tremendous resources online for the public to learn about our great state. Our partnership with Google will empower Californians to know more about our government and provide better access to services and helpful information."
Currently much of the information available on government web sites is stored in databases which are not accessible for search engines to index. Instead, most government web sites rely on their own varied search engines. The aim of the partnerships announced today is to allow the public to more easily access information about governmental services using Google search engine technology on both specific government web sites and at Google's search engine.
Advocates of easy access to public information are mostly applauding the announced partnerships, while consumer privacy experts fear that with the additional information available using Google the danger of releasing private information increases. It appears that the information in question on the web sites of California, Virginia, Utah and Arizona is all currently accessible through each web site for those willing to take the time to learn how to access it.
As many as 80% of visitors to government web sites come from search engines according to July, 2006 statistics from comScore and internal Google research, but once there and faced with unfamiliar and sometimes difficult searching technology, many people leave without finding what they were looking for. Due to the difficulty many experience when trying to access pubic information on government web sites, companies offering to do the searching for you have been available for some time. With Google indexing government information, today's announcement may affect such companies, as state government public information becomes more easily available through the large search engines.
Virginia Governor Tim Kaine noted, "Transparent digital government is a top priority in Virginia. Our goal is to provide easy, quick, and intuitive citizen access to every government resource. Google is helping us to achieve it."
The partnerships appear to be a logical extension of Google's existing U.S. Government Search service, although surprisingly it was not mentioned in today's announcement.
The first portion of the Google plan has involved training, education, and advice to webmasters and technology managers. Chris Cummiskey, Arizona's chief information officer noted, "We're very impressed with the early results of this partnership. The citizens of our state will have access to more state government information that's more relevant to their daily lives."
Google presented the Sitemap Protocol as the heart of the partnerships. A sitemap generates a listing of the pages on a web site in Extensible Markup Language (XML) format, a practice also backed by Microsoft and Yahoo. By making sure that all their web site's pages containing public information are included in the sitemap, participating states will ensure that this information is accessible to search engines.
Virginia and Utah have already implemented Google's Custom Search Engine™ on their government web sites, and allow people to search not only state but local and federal sources all at once. This custom Google search engine is available free to governments, personal and commercial web sites through Google's Co-op program.
Google staff have worked with state technology officers for six months, and have also talked to Federal agencies including the Departments of Education and Energy, looking to help them in similar ways. Arizona Governor Janet Napolitano, Chair of the National Governors Association said, "Government must be innovative in order to offer the best possible services to citizens. Through this Google partnership, Arizona is continuing to fulfill its responsibility to make state government as open and
accessible as possible to the public.”
Google Indexing Government Information
The four states chose to first optimize and make available to search engines information they consider particularly useful to the public. For example, visitors to Utah's state government web site can now easily find information such as job prospects, in Virginia people now have easier access to history information from the Library of Virginia, and in Arizona site visitors can quickly find state licensed real estate agents.
According to the Virginia state government web site, various government entities in the state are urged to implement Google's Custom Search Engine™. Google's easily understood format among the public is one reason Virginia chose to enter into the partnership, according to their web site. Another Virginia governmental web site touts Google's friendly and intuitive user interface as being better than the previously-used web site search technology.
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