The New York State Senate's new Open Legislation portal launched this morning, meant as an upgrade to this. Among the new features on this beta version of Open Legislation: the dead-simple Google-like search interface you see above, and, thanks to the advent of permalinks, the ability for Google to actually crawl and serve up the site. Beyond that, the new portal has an assortment of options for tracking and pulling structured legislative information, either via API or data feed (XML, CSV, and JSON). What's more, there's built in commenting, so you can make your opinion known. Down the road, says state senate CIO Andrew Hoppin, the site will grow to be a tool for preemptive disclosure, as a home for documents and materials previously available only through Freedom of Information Law requests.

Give it a test drive.