Google helping Utah with its searchable data

Google is set to announce it is working with officials in four US 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 website or, more commonly, in a database that a search engine's crawlers can't access, said JL 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.

Needham said: "We've opened up specific 'long tail'-type of documents on these state agency websites that up until now were not visible but are now flowing into Google in the hundreds of thousands. We're creating a backdoor 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."

Google is also working with officials in Utah and Virginia to help create Custom Search Engines for those government websites. Google takes a subset of its index related to specific "vertical" searches or specific types of content. Google hosts the search. Custom Search Engines allow people to sort for information by codes and regulation or multimedia, Needham said. For example, someone could search for information about a specific geographic region through a Custom Search Engine on Utah's website and find data from all levels of government, he said.

Elinor Mills writes for CNET News.com