May 2, 2007 at 18:48Google pushes US states to open public documents
By providing free advice and software, Google helps the state power system collect public documents that are now either unavailable or hard to access on the Internet to make them open to Web users. In the end,
Google hopes to convince the federal authorities to use the same software: on the one hand, this is an interest among open-board supporters, and on the other, some experts are concerned about privacy.
Google plans to announce partnerships with four states — Arizona, California, Utah, and Virginia — to lift technical barriers that prevented their search service (like Microsoft and Yahoo) from accessing tens of thousands of government documents in education, real estate, healthcare, and the environment.
New documents will be available not only for search engines Google, Yahoo and Microsoft.
Mr. JL Needham, head of Google’s public sector content partnership, said that at least 70% of visitors to government sites came from exclusively commercial search engines. The thing is that state computer systems are not programmed (as I understand it, .htaccess and robots.txt are not used correctly), which allows only commercial search services to search for information in their databases. And since the user cannot find the information available in government sites, he does not blame the sites themselves, but the search engine.
However, not everyone finds this news enjoyable. California chief press officer Clark Kelso and executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, Marc Rotenberg, are concerned about privacy violations and are calling on agencies in all states to remove social security card numbers and other sensitive information from various locations. documents that will now be available on the web. Rotenberg also says that Google already has a bad past regarding privacy, hinting that Google will keep track of search queries by users accessing government data in order to advertise for them.
Google hopes to convince the federal authorities to use the same software: on the one hand, this is an interest among open-board supporters, and on the other, some experts are concerned about privacy.
Google plans to announce partnerships with four states — Arizona, California, Utah, and Virginia — to lift technical barriers that prevented their search service (like Microsoft and Yahoo) from accessing tens of thousands of government documents in education, real estate, healthcare, and the environment.
New documents will be available not only for search engines Google, Yahoo and Microsoft.
Mr. JL Needham, head of Google’s public sector content partnership, said that at least 70% of visitors to government sites came from exclusively commercial search engines. The thing is that state computer systems are not programmed (as I understand it, .htaccess and robots.txt are not used correctly), which allows only commercial search services to search for information in their databases. And since the user cannot find the information available in government sites, he does not blame the sites themselves, but the search engine.
However, not everyone finds this news enjoyable. California chief press officer Clark Kelso and executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, Marc Rotenberg, are concerned about privacy violations and are calling on agencies in all states to remove social security card numbers and other sensitive information from various locations. documents that will now be available on the web. Rotenberg also says that Google already has a bad past regarding privacy, hinting that Google will keep track of search queries by users accessing government data in order to advertise for them.