One argument a senior executive of the Honolulu Star-Advertiser makes in opposing online legal notices in Hawaii is that Google is “ineffective.”

“For electronic searches, Google has become a widely adopted standard, but it is ineffective for public information searches on government websites,” Dave Kennedy, senior vice president of the newspaper, says in written testimony to the Hawaii Legislature. 

Interesting, given that the Star-Advertiser uses Google as the search engine for its own website.

I wrote elsewhere about why Hawaii should switch to online legal notices. So I won’t delve into that here.

But I thought it would be worth asking Google what it thought about the newspaper’s view of the efficacy of its search engine.

Here’s what Sean Carlson, Manager, Global Communications & Public Affairs for Google, told me in an email:

“For anybody looking to refine a search across only government websites, they can easily use our site-search feature, adding “site:.gov” after their keywords — or specify this through our Advanced Search options here: http://www.google.com/advanced_search  This works as well for specific government sites… for instance, searching for “notice site:honolulu.gov”.”

Carlson also pointed to advice for any web operation on how to improve search results.

“For any websites, government or otherwise, seeking best practices for helping Google find, crawl, and index their site… our Webmaster Guidelines resource includes design, content, technical, and quality guidelines: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769.”

You have to wonder why a newspaper exec thinks Google couldn’t make public documents more accessible than requiring a person to subscribe to a print newspaper or visit a library every day to thumb through paper copies.

• John Temple, Editor, Honolulu Civil Beat