Aneesh Chopra’s nomination by President Obama as America’s first Chief Technology Officer signals good news for journalists and news organizations. Lowering the cost of access to data is one way of bringing down the cost of reporting, without laying off anyone. Making government data, state or federal, more transparent, and improving site searches lets reporters spend time reporting. Chopra has used a public-private partnership to move Virginia’s government data in this direction.
Chopra, as Secretary of Technology for Virginia, explained the problem this way in 2007 to The Washington Post: a search of the Medicaid site might produce records about a specific doctor, but users wouldn’t see complaints lodged against the doctor that are listed in another state database, from the Department of Health Professions site.
Chopra led efforts to build a public-private partnership between Google and the state, announced in January 2008, that centered on implementing a site map protocol and customized search to make them more usable by opening more of their content up to commercial search engines. A site map protocol is a standard that permits a Web site owner to communicate the contents of pages and posts within a Web site to a range of search engines, so that more content is universally searchable. Instead of just indexing a homepage, a site map protocol lets a variety of search engines index many pages in a Web site.
Google is working with officials in Arizona, Utah, and California, as well as Virginia, to address the gap between a public who searches for government information using search engines like Google, and the significant share of the information on state agency Web sites that hasn’t been indexed to appear in these kind of search engines.
Visitors to Virginia.gov, the site created by Chopra’s office and Google, can search for information from all sectors of government, whether provided by a federal, state, or local government source, thanks to the Google custom search service and site map protocols. This ability to search across databases from different levels of government can speed up the reporting process, if it is done right.
Google assisted Chopra’s office in implementing these Web site improvements at no cost to taxpayers, which is welcome news today.
