States Expose More Data to Google

Finding information about education and health-care services in California is about to get much easier. The same is true of looking for a state job in Utah or doing research at the Virginia State Library.

To make public information readily available to its citizens online, four states — Arizona, California, Utah and Virginia — have formed partnerships with Google to allow broader data searches of government information. The states will serve up databases and other information sources through their Web sites that were not previously accessible to Google or other large search engines.

Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano calls the partnership a way to fulfill a responsibility to make state government as open and accessible as possible.

In his company’s announcement of the partnerships, Google CEO Eric Schmidt says his company hopes to make similar agreements with government agencies at all levels.

Besides making more information accessible through Google, the four states also note that they have upgraded the search tools used on some of their agencies’ sites.