Google is set to announce Monday that it is working with officials in four U.S. states to make sure all the public information they have online is easily accessible through the company’s search engine.
As part of a voluntary public-private sector partnership, Google has been helping technology managers in Arizona, California, Utah and Virginia remove technical barriers that prevent the search giant from adding information to its index. Some state government documents are hidden behind design elements of the Web site or, more commonly, in a database that a search engine’s crawlers can’t access, said J.L. Needham, manager of public sector content partnerships at Google.
Thus, job seekers in Utah can now search on Google to find job postings provided by the state’s Department of Workforce Services. Virginia students interested in the state’s colonial history can now use Google to access information at the Library of Virginia state archives. In Arizona, home buyers can find information about licensed agents through the Department of Real Estate.
“We’ve opened up specific ‘long tail’-type of documents on these state agency Web sites that up until now were not visible, but are now flowing into Google in the hundreds of thousands,” Needham said. “We’re creating a back door so we can copy all the pages and make the URLs part of our index so a user can find the result, click a link and be in that database.”
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