Google Partners With Four U.S. States on Search

Google said Monday it had partnered with Arizona, California, Utah, and Virginia to add its search capabilities to the websites of those governments.

In addition to offering its search technologies to these states, it would also take steps to ensure that public information was also more accessible from the search engine's own site. This would include indexing portions of the site normally missed by most search spiders.

The effort uses the Google-developed "sitemap protocol" to index the catalog of pages within these websites. In theory, it helps other search engines also crawl these sites earlier, since other companies such as Yahoo, Microsoft, and Ask.com have adopted the technology.

However, it is unclear whether the location of these sitemaps will be made public so that other companies may use them. Google did say that no financial payments changed hands.

The partnership works like this: on the Google engine, searching for public information from any of the four states likely sees the government information as one of the first-returned results if it is available online.

Conversely, the states will use Google search technology as the preferred method to search through the vast amounts of information available on their Web sites.