A new technique for searching state online sites, developed with the search engine Google.com, will not cause any privacy issues, insist Utah officials.

Besides Utah, the pilot project involves records maintained by Virginia, Arizona and California. A report published Monday cited concerns that making information more accessible might lead to privacy violations, as some records are tied to Social Security numbers and other personal indicators.

But Stephen Fletcher, the state's chief information officer, said privacy and sensitive information are "not even an issue." The new search 'bot, which was installed on state Web pages last week, does not uncover any data not available earlier on the Internet.

"Essentially, we're sorting things differently," he said in a telephone interview Monday.

When someone uses the custom search engine to look for data, a new index will pull up Web sites for government agencies throughout Utah that might be helpful. The search extends to counties, health departments and other levels of government.

No new personal information is released. The data available is simply indexed better so that it can be accessed more easily, according to Fletcher.

"The idea here is to try to get those (Web sites) that are most closely related all brought ... essentially to the top of the list."

Information experts have worked with Google to identify services that should be grouped together, he added.

No money changed hands in the deal. "We just had to enter into an agreement and we had to work with them."

Fletcher said if the pilot project does not work well, the state can pull out of the agreement. However, "it's been going pretty well."

Looking into the way information is organized was an interesting exercise, he said. It prompted officials to examine what kind of services it was providing residents through the Internet.

"What sort of information or what sort of Web sites are they looking for?" he asked.

Ironically, while Utah and Google have worked closely on this project, the Internet behemoth has challenged the state on another front, the state's Trademark Protection Act. That law, passed by the 2007 Legislature and signed into law by Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr., is designed to block use by Google and other Web engines from using trademark names for certain Web advertising.

A company could register its trademarked name to prevent a search engine from using it to trigger advertisements from a rival business.

Google has threatened a lawsuit over the matter. But Mike Mower, Huntsman's deputy chief of staff, told the Deseret Morning News the pilot project and the trademark dispute are not connected.

"They're two separate issues," Mower said.

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E-mail: bau@desnews.com