Search engine giant Google has announced a new deal with four US state governments to help make state government information more accessible, via both Google and the states' own sites.Google will provide free consultation and software to the states of Arizona, California, Utah and Virginia in a bid to remove technical barriers, which up to now have prevented Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! from accessing tens of thousands of public records. These records cover such information as education, real estate, health care and the environment.
The announced partnership involves no financial re-numeration between the parties involved, but does unlock the vast amount of information that was previously inaccessible to consumer web search services. The newly available information will not be exclusive to Google, Microsoft or Yahoo!, but will be available through most - if not all - search engines currently in existence.
Darrell West, a professor of political Science at Brown University, Rhode Island, commented on the announcement:
"A lot of state agencies view their websites as billboards as opposed to dynamic means of two-way communications between governments and their citizens... The problem is that there are some parts of government sites that search engines can't reach."
In claiming that around 70 per cent of visitors to state government websites find their way through commercial search engines, J.L. Needham, Google's product manager for public sector partnerships added:
"The reality is that much information on state Web sites is public, but effectively it's not, because it's hard to find."
The new initiative takes advantage of 'sitemap protocol', which makes it easier for website administrators to grant or deny access to search engines into specific parts of a website - ultimately allowing the search engines to build a list of web pages on the site. The protocol was developed by Google, and is now utilised by other search engines, including Yahoo!, Microsoft and Ask.com.
However, despite the benefits of this new project for those conducting web searches, privacy advocates have been quick to voice their disapproval, claiming they are worried about 'unintended consequences' - cautioning that some of the newly available records may contain personal and confidential information that would not otherwise be widely available.
The Washington-based Electronic Privacy Information Center have already filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission, urging them to investigate Google regarding issues of privacy, as well as its recent acquisition of online advertising company DoubleClick Inc.
California's chief information officer, Clark Kelso, has also voiced his concern about the consumer privacy issues raised by this initiative. He has instructed all state agencies to redact Social Security numbers and other confidential information from documents that will now be available online.
But while increased access to government records could raise potential privacy concerns, Needham has stated that the aim of the initiative is to make public information more accessible. "We are not about cracking open internal records and making them public," he said.
