As the leading search engine, those who use Google in an attempt to find what they need probably won’t find it if it’s stuffed behind an online search form at an agency’s site.

Today, the Google Public Policy blog noted the company’s testimony before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee about this problem. Google’s J.L. Needham called out forms as an obstacle to indexing content effectively:

The most common barrier is the search form for a database that asks users to input several fields of information to find what they’re looking for. Our crawlers cannot effectively follow the links to reach behind the search form.

Google tipped the Sitemaps protocol, accepted at all of the major search engines, as a way for government sites to help guide the spiders to the content that citizens want to discover in search. It’s also in use at the government’s main information portal, USA.gov.

The search ad company also cited the release of a Center for Democracy & Technology report on how the government has published information and made it available to searchers. Their report lambasted availability of responses to some important queries:

A search for "New York radiation" does not find basic FEMA and DHS information about current conditions and monitoring.

A search to help grandparents with a question about visitation of their grandchildren in any search engine does not turn up an article of the same title located on the Web site of the Administration for Children & Families.

A search for "small farm loans" turns up the commercial offers for loans, and statistics about government loans, but not most of the major federal government programs designed to help fund small farms.

Like Google, CDT exhorted the Feds to pass the E-Government reauthorization act, and to take steps to enable search crawlers to find content more efficiently.

follow me on Twitter

Proposed legislation in the Indian Parliament would uphold this principle, except that now the Standing Committee on Information Technology is recommending against wording that removes "intermediaries" from liability:

What is relevant here is that when [the] platform is abused for transmission of allegedly obscene and objectionable contents, the intermediaries/service providers should not be absolved of responsibility.

Google India policy analyst, Rishi Jaitly argues that a small semantic difference could stifle Internet innovation in the country:

Jaitly writes:

[T]he Committee may have believed that the proposed amendment would provide absolute immunity to Internet intermediaries, and wished to stress the need for a clear obligation to react promptly when put on notice of unlawful content. If this was, in fact, the case, the Committee’s intent, its report would be consistent with the proposed amendment, and in line with global best practices. If not, the Committee’s position would likely result in the hobbling of the Internet in India.

Holding intermediaries accountable for how people use their services would require those intermediaries to police content and speech, which brings up another host of issues. Jaitly argues that denying intermediaries safe harbor would crush India’s Internet economy.

The choice for the Indian government is stark: If it wishes to enable Indians to have access to cutting-edge Internet services, and to promote innovation on the Internet, the Department of Information Technology should uphold the principle of qualified safe harbors for Internet intermediaries.

Chavez provided several excerpts of articles written in op-ed pieces on major media outlets, all of which find no issues in the marketplace should the $3.1 billion acquisition of DoubleClick by Google pass regulatory hurdles.

An appropriate observation here would be to compare what has been excerpted to what isn’t being said. Music fans know the spaces between the notes are as important as the notes themselves. Chavez’s selections leave plenty of spaces.

No one is arguing counter to the Financial Times’ editorial claim that Google and DoubleClick are different types of businesses. That hasn’t been the concern.

The question that has to be answered is, can a single company post-Google/DoubleClick deal compete effectively with them? That doesn’t even begin to touch the issue of all that personal data the combined company would have at its fingertips.

Harvard Business School professor John Deighton’s excerpt, courtesy of the Los Angeles Times, believes Google will behave itself with regards to that data. Investment firm Piper Jaffray, whose former star Safa Rashtchy’s Google cheerleading has been picked up by current star Gene Munster, likewise feels advertiser concerns about the two companies sharing ad data “are likely overblown.”

Really, one reads things like this, and wonders if the people making these comments truly have a worldview of corporations akin to a small fawn seeing the headlights of an onrushing Hummer for the first and last time on a stretch of highway. They just don’t see what could possibly go wrong.

Maybe there isn’t cause for concern, but being told we should just trust a multi-billion dollar corporation to do the right thing, because, you know, they aren’t evil, doesn’t inspire us with complete confidence.

The Google Public Policy blog noted how Google supports patent reform legislation before Congress. Google is one of the numerous big tech names backing the Coalition for Patent Fairness and its position on patent reform.

Google’s public policy blog posts have been a fascinating read since the blog debuted. This time it isn’t just the post that catches our interest.

A response by Ben Klemens, guest scholar at The Brookings Institution, asked Google to clarify its stance on patents, namely those in the contentious world of technology:

I can’t tell from your public statement here whether you in the public policy department support or do not support software patents per se, though I would bet you a dollar that if you surveyed your employees, the great majority would call software and business method patents an impediment.

Why is Google supporting this tepid bill? Have you determined that it’s time your engineers revise their ethical beliefs regarding mathematical algorithms? Or is a bill that would address subject matter problems just too unlikely to work?

Google may be trying to have its cake and eat it too, to quote the ancient clich

That wasn’t it. Instead, Google wanted to highlight his participation in various public policy ventures around this great US of A. Recently, Schmidt ventured to Traverse City, Michigan, and told the National Governors Association that “education must evolve” from rote memorization to teaching them how to “research and access information.”

I wonder what online resource he might recommend as a starting point for teachers?

A video of his chat with the Governors has been posted on the Google Public Policy blog. Alan Davidson, senior policy counsel for Google, also noted the CEO joined YouTube’s co-founders, Steve Chan and Chad Hurley, in South Carolina for the CNN/YouTube Presidential Debate.

If any of the videos CNN selected for the debate asked a substantive question that elicited an original answer from the Democratic hopefuls, please page Jon Stewart. And the rest of America.

From steamy Charleston, Mr. Schmidt traveled to Washington to visit a more wretched hive of scum and villainy Capitol Hill to chat up members of both Houses about “health care, patent reform, immigration, privacy and consumer issues.”

No net neutrality discussions? No pressing the Senators and Representatives to prod the FCC on adopting Google’s four platforms of openness for the 700 MHz auction?

Let’s hope his trip in August to the Aspen Summit proves more entertaining.

“Google Publicizes Public Policy Blog”

Did you know that 99.6 percent of Americans receive their broadband service from either a cable or a telephone company? Or that many people have only one choice for a broadband provider, if they have one at all?

That was part of a recent post at Google’s new-but-not-new Public Policy blog. Google’s Richard Whitt, Washington Telecom and Media Counsel, said it’s a duopoly in the language of the antitrust laws.

A lot of people may be seeing that post and many others on the Public Policy blog for the first time. Until this week, it’s been available just to the people inside Google. The company’s Andrew McLaughlin explained what they want to accomplish:

You may be wondering why it contains two months’ worth of posts, given that we’re only just now launching. Well, we started the blog internally back in April, to limber up our blogging muscles. Now that we’ve gone public we thought it’d be fun to share our earlier internal posts. In the weeks and months ahead, expect to hear more from us on issues like net neutrality, censorship, innovation regulation, immigration, R&D, national security, and trade, just to name a few.

Though the current topics are mostly US-centric, McLaughlin noted how Google is a multinational corporation. We take that to mean issues outside the US should receive some coverage on the new blog. After all, the Internet doesn’t really have borders.

Sen. Dorgan Praises Net Neutrality Coalition

Dorgan cited Stevens’ role in stonewalling a vote on the issue on the Senate floor last summer, and Whitacre’s expressed intent to develop a tiered Internet.

The North Dakota senator also praised the Free Press’ SaveTheInternet grassroots campaign, which is nominated for a Webby award, to preserve the medium’s open architecture – an architecture that has made it "one of the wonders of the world." Thanks to the coalition, he said, Net Neutrality has moved from an unknown technical issue to on of the predominant debates.

Dorgan believes the Senate is now "developing a consensus" on the issue, as more Washington politicians sign on to his and Sen. Olympia Snowe’s (R-ME) Internet Freedom Preservation Act, a piece of legislation similar to what the FCC required of AT&T in order to merge with Bell South.

“The Internet became a robust engine of economic development by enabling anyone with a good idea to connect to consumers and compete on a level playing field," he said. "The marketplace picked winners and losers, not some central gatekeeper. That freedom — the very core of what makes the Internet what it is today — must be preserved.”

At a year old, SaveTheInternet.com has attracted support from both sides of the political spectrum, small businesses as well as major online corporations like Google, collecting 1.6 million petition signers.

"Pretty much everybody is in favor of Net Neutrality except those running fake grassroots campaigns," said Craig Newmark, founder of the online classifieds site Craigslist.

The "fake" campaigns to which Newmark refers are ones that have had their origins traced back to telecommunications giants like AT&T. The telecommunications and cable industries have been staunch opponents of the Net Neutrality movement, and so have, by default, the members of Congress who rely heavily on them for campaign contributions.

Though Verizon and AT&T have characterized the Net Neutrality movement as one funded by billion-dollar Internet giants like Google and Microsoft, who they say stand to gain most, small businesses and nonprofits alike fear the lack of protection Net Neutrality legislation can offer.

Gary Miracle, owner of NMChili.com and other small retail sites, said that learning of the telcos plans to create a tiered system, where big-dollar companies could pay to have their sites delivered faster than the competition, "scared the bejeezus" of him. Their plans were reminiscent, he said, of the steep cable price increases over the past 20 years.

Paying "100 times" what he’s paying now would "put a real dent into my operation," he said.

But for Michelle Combs, representing the Christian Coalition, lack of Net Neutrality protection carries other concerns. "We have over 100,000 churches in our membership," she said. "Churches rely on the Internet and even have sermons on the Internet. We’re concerned. We’re getting the word out."

Combs said that organizations like hers were slow to adopt the movement because the concept wasn’t easily explained in the beginning. But now that more are beginning to understand the issue better, people are gravitating toward it – especially in light of concern that ISPs could, in theory, block or deteriorate the pathways by which the Christian Coalition spreads its message.

"Our goal is turn Net Neutrality into a true family issue," she said. "We are concerned that if they can control our content, then they can control our mission."

Ben Scott, policy director at FreePress, echoed Combs. "That’s the concern we all share from the content side. We’ve had no gatekeepers. We think that’s the magic of the Internet – an equal platform for democratic communication."

That platform for democratic communication is what propelled the Net Neutrality movement to the attention of American policymakers in the first place.

"What we’ve seen over the last year is nothing short of a grass roots Internet revolution," said Adam Green, Civic Communications Director for MoveOn.org. "Millions derailed a bill in Congress that would have allowed AT&T and Verizon to dictate what websites you open."