Sidebar: Back to the Web

Computerworld - While many organizations switch from a Web search to an enterprise search engine, the FirstGov portal has gone the other way. FirstGov, which acts as the official home page for the U.S federal government, is managed by the General Services Administration.

When the site launched in the fall of 2000, it used a custom search engine created by a foundation established by Eric Brewer, founder of search engine pioneer Inktomi. Then, in the spring of 2002, the site started using an enterprise search engine from Fast Search & Transfer that would index the data contained within all the government agency sites.

"We were crawling all the government sites ourselves," says Bob Keating, the GSA's search and program manager. "The model didn't scale well to what we needed to do in searching the entire government."

This past January, the site reverted to a Web search model. FirstGov now uses Vivisimo Inc.'s Clusty Web search technology with Microsoft Corp.'s MSN Web index. MSN already crawls all the government sites for its own index.

"We are using the MSN index filtered for government sites rather than doing any crawling ourselves," says Keating. "Rather than reinvent the wheel, we get the data from somebody who already does it really well."

As a result, the GSA has replaced the 24 servers it was using for the FirstGov site with a service hosted by Pittsburgh-based Vivisimo, cutting its costs in half. In the process, the number of official government documents available through the site has increased from 8 million to 40 million. It also provides searchers with easier access to relevant information by clustering the search results by category. For example, the search results page now has a tab listing federal forms that match the query.

"We still use [Autonomy's K2] enterprise search for the GSA.gov site," says M.J. Pizella, associate administrator of the GSA's Office of Citizen Services and Communications. "But for FirstGov, we wanted to get information quicker, without having to get into the agency sites, and Web search allows us to do that."