Mountain View (CA) - Google announced yesterday that it is working on a new search tool that will allow users to search through databases of public information from the government. States that have signed on for the initial test are Arizona, California, Utah, and Virginia.

Although most states have an exhaustive set of data on their official government websites, much of it is either unobtainable or difficult to find. Google's plan is to help index the state sites to make information easier to find, as well as making that same info appear on Google when users run a normal web search.

Google's product manager for the new project J.L. Needham told Reuters that while this will give Google access to the government sites, "We are only here making public information more accessible. We are not about cracking open internal records and making them public."

The partnership involved no financial transactions between Google and the states, according to Reuters.