State records will be easier to view with Google deal

Anyone who wants to check on the complaint records of a specific contractor or a day care center will find the task much easier as the result of a partnership between Google and the state of Arizona announced Monday.

About 160,000 state documents that are public records but have been difficult to access online will appear prominently in Google and other search engines beginning this week, allowing computer users to find the records more easily than was previously possible through state government Web sites.

The partnership was announced Monday by Gov. Janet Napolitano and Google officials at the Google offices in Tempe.

Napolitano said the project will transform the way state government presents information to the public.

“It eliminates a lot of the hassles and it simplifies the process of searching for Arizona records,” she said. “And it will be a way to make government even more transparent.”

State agencies whose records will be accessible through the most commonly used search engines will be the registrar of contractors, the Arizona Health Care Cost Containment System, the Government Information Technology Agency, the governor’s office, and the departments of administration, health services, public safety and real estate. State job openings will also be available.

Examples of specific information that will be more easily available are licensing records of day care centers held by the Department of Health Services and the licensing records of real estate agents held by the Department of Real Estate, officials said.

The information will appear in the Google search engine results in a few weeks, said J.L. Needham, Google’s manager of public sector content partnerships.

Previously, if a citizen wanted information on a real estate agent, the computer user would have to know the specific state Web site on which the information was held. Now a user will simply launch a search on that person through a commercial search engine such as Google, Yahoo! and MSN, and those search engines will take the user to the right page inside the state database.

A person who is frustrated in trying to find information could revert to the time consuming method of calling an agency or going in person to a government office, Needham said. Thus the project should make state government more efficient, he said.

“If government is creating information and putting it online . . . this information should be as easy to find as the address of your favorite restaurant,” he said.

Arizona is joining California, Utah and Virginia in the first group of states to roll out the service. Needham said those states were chosen because they could adopt their records rapidly.

He said the company hopes to expand the service to other states and more federal documents as well as to records of Arizona counties and municipalities.

Answering criticism that the service could create privacy issues by making personal information more readily accessible, Napolitano said only state records that are already public will be available through the search engines.

“We are making sure that the information available on the state databases is not the type of private information that would lead to identify theft,” she said.

If the service is expanded to county government records, efforts will be needed to make sure the counties follow the same policy on personal information, she said.

The service is being provided at no cost to the states. The process of making government records available to the search engine is relatively easy, requiring only that government technology managers submit information lists to Google that allow the search engine can “crawl” automatically to those pages, Needham said.

Chris Cummiskey, the state’s chief information officer, said records from more state agencies will join the program over time.

He said the state is interested in the effort because the public is increasingly using search engines to gain information about state government rather than going to the Web pages of state agencies.