Google-Florida Partnership

I saw an article in the Palm Beach Post today that looked interesting. It seems that Florida is one of six states to work with Google, along with California, Arizona, Michigan, Utah and Virginia.

What you might ask are they doing? Well, by agreeing to a common standard produced by Google and other search engines like Yahoo, documents can be found by simple queries on a search engine, rather than navigating individual state Web sites.

So far, records from the departments of State, Workforce Innovation, Education, Environmental Protection, Business and Professional Regulation and Law Enforcement have been made search-engine friendly and other agencies’ records will be added in the coming weeks.

For those of you who are already thinking about privacy issues, rest assured that only records already publicly available can be searched in this fashion.

 

What search engine do you love?

I think I can state honestly that people who use the internet and search engines really love the search engine they use. It seems we either love them or we hate them… I use Google most of the time but check out others on a regular basis because I feel I need to be familiar with what’s out there.

What brought this up you might ask? Well, it was an article in the CNET News blog which discussed several of the major search engines and their never-ending race to be first! It seems that these: Google, Ask.com, Microsoft Live Search, and Yahoo have all made some major changes this year beginning with Google’s update in May. Ask.com followed in June and this week Microsoft has upgraded its Live Search. Chances are that Yahoo will be next.

So what does this mean for us? Well, for one thing, it means that any of the major search engines will quickly give us a great number of relevant results. It also means that we can now get images, videos, and other search types from any of these search engines.

I saw an ad on tv the other day for Ask.com and, of course, had to check it out. I liked it, you should check it out for yourself…but will I switch from Google? No, probably not…but I will certainly suggest it as an alternative search engine.