NIST Search

NIST Google Search Appliance Solution

Solutions: Google Search Appliance Deployment and Development
Vertical: Government

The National Institute of Standards and Technology has data coming from multiple sources and the agency desired to provide an integrated search solution that would enable users to be able to search the entire site through a single search interface. The agency had been relying on various legacy search solutions but had a need to unify search for the enterprise and create a more user friendly experience.

Fig Leaf worked closely with NIST to set up their Google Search Appliances, install and configure the devices and implement the overall search experience using XSLT. Fig Leaf Software implemented standard crawling of the customer's environment and forumulated custom code to feed content into the appliance from a a variety of different sources. In addition, Fig Leaf set up a set of database crawls, and configured interfaces for the various specialized searches such as the Publications Search and Staff Listings.

The new Google Enterprise Search provides users quick and easy access to content via a search box available throughout the site. Users can quickly toggle to see results from the entire site or narrow the search to Projects and Programs, News, Events or Staff listing. In addition, search results can be sorted by date or relevance with one easy click.

Beyond the simple search, Fig Leaf created a new advanced NIST Publication search which provides enterprise search across all NIST publications and replaces a legacy Oracle search solution that was slow and unstable. To visit the new NIST publication search use the following link:

http://www.nist.gov/publication-portal.cfm

The new NIST publication search:

Leverages the content that has been meta-tagged in the CommonSpot Content Management System for search categorization
Utilizes the Google Search Appliance feeds interface to maintain and update database content
Has added functionality, that was not present in the past, that now allows users to search on full author name, for example Smith, M.V., and receive the fast, relevant results
Allows for full text search of titles, abstracts, author names, all with the ability to filter by date

The new search solution built upon the Google Search Appliance platform is robust and scalable and provides citizens with easy access to information from across the NIST enterprise.