Googling Government

In general, the public sector has a pretty wretched reputation for making it difficult to find digital information in their online systems. Sometimes this is deliberate, for perceived security reasons, but more often it's just the inevitable result of a big organization not being able to coordinate all its subsystems. Google has announced this week, however, that it is beginning to partner with state governments, beginning with Arizona, California, Utah and Virginia, to make government records more easily available via the Google search engine.

Google is providing the states with a custom search engine that knows how to navigate the various repositories of digital information squirreled away in a maze of state databases. From one engine, you can find things as varied as job listings and student test scores.

No doubt this is going to make life easier for those doing research online, and will probably be a boon to consumers as well. So now we wait to see if privacy problems crop up. As I live in California, you can bet I'm going to see if my SSN pops up in any of the searchable records.

Posted by Kevin Carlson at 10:06 PM  Permalink