The GSA Landed...

Our infrastructure team may have thought something landed in their network rack when amidst all the black and silver sea of clones appears a bright yellow Google-stamped box. The interloper is a welcomed addition to the Web Portal search. The GSA (Google Search Appliance) replaced the SOLR search engine on our Web Portal in early January.

The Basics
The GSA has some great native capabilities, aside from being a proven leader in search engines. It is smart enough to suggest spelling corrections if you mistyped something. It makes use of the faceted search tags within our content. It will even give some of its own suggestions after you search for a term. Like google.com, it indents results that come from the same domain, or in our site case, from within the same content area. If you want to see more from a specific content area, just click the 'More Results from' hyperlink.

The Document Gotchas
The SOLR search engine was configured to use friendly document titles that our content contributors entered in the Content Management System. The GSA, like all other web search engines, relies on the document title property that is within the file itself. Most people probably don't pay close attention to the title properties in their documents and many free PDF conversion software takes great liberties in populating these for the new PDF. In short, we tried to clean up and populate as many document titles as we could before GSA went live, but we could not get them all. You may see a cryptic document title returned in search if we have not gotten to it yet.

If you were accustomed to searching for DXF and DWG files in the old search, you won't be able to pull these files in the GSA search. It doesn't support these types, but, you will still find the pages that list all these files with links to the documents.

We are not short on any old documents so we zipped up some of the archival documents ZIP files. The GSA  doesn't search into the ZIP files or provide friendly titles like the previous engine, so the ZIP files may seem a little different. We plan to implement an advanced search option that will allow people to look for archival documents, forms, press releases, etc.

Ready, Set, Search
If you haven't tried the new search on the Web Portal, try it out! If you search for something and just can't find it, let me know. We could be missing content that you find valuable. We could be using words and terminology that differ from the public's wording. Whatever the circumstance, we want you to the find the information you need!