Google Offers Search Capabilities for Government Websites

Government websites have always been a mystery to search engines. In the past, if you needed information from a government site, you’d better have a pretty good idea of where to look. But times, they are a changin’. Google recently released the information they have partnered with Arizona, California, Utah and Virginia to add its search capabilities to their government websites. That means on the Google engine, searching for public information from any of the four states likely sees the government information as one of the first-returned results if it is available online. At the other end, the states will use Google search technology as the preferred method to search through the vast amounts of information available on their Web sites.

In addition to offering its search technologies to these states, it would also take steps to ensure that public information was also more accessible from the search engine’s own site. This would include indexing portions of the site normally missed by most search spiders. That’s the good part. The project is using the Google-developed “sitemap protocol” to index the catalog of pages within these websites. In theory, it helps other search engines also crawl these sites earlier, since other companies such as Yahoo, Microsoft, and Ask.com have adopted the technology as well.

However, it is unclear whether the location of these sitemaps will be made public so that other companies may use them. That’s the bad part.

At any rate, if work takes you to Arizona, California, Utah or Virginia, you can now find government information quicker.