GlobalNet Services, Inc. and the Food and Drug Administration

Founded in 1995, GlobalNet Services, Inc. (GNSI), is a fast-growing, award-winning information technology firm. GNSI provides web-application development, systems integration, enterprise search solutions, and business intelligence solutions.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is a scientific, regulatory and public health agency that works to ensure the safety, efficacy, and security of human and veterinary drugs, biological products, medical devices, U.S. food supply, and cosmetics. The FDA’s regulations serve to make medicines and foods more effective, safer, and more affordable. The agency also is responsible for informing the public with accurate information on medicines and foods.

Challenge

For over 10 years, GNSI has supported the FDA with technology integration and Internet strategies. The FDA was running an older search engine for its public site at www.fda.gov with mixed results. The search function was not consistently reliable or speedy, nor was it accurate in the information it returned. The FDA wanted a better solution.

Solution

GNSI recommended a single Google Search Appliance model GB-5005 for the FDA. In particular they felt the built-in redundancy and reliability of this model would be a good match for the challenge. GNSI installed and configured the Google Search Appliance at the FDA hosting provider. The search results are much better for the million documents the FDA site houses. Indexing bandwidth is a fraction of what it used to be and the Google appliance requires almost no maintenance. The feedback from the public and the FDA's users has been extremely positive.

Results

Today the FDA’s Google Search Appliance crawls one million documents across www.fda.gov. Ori Reiss, GNSI President and CEO, says that both citizens and the FDA staff, who make heavy use of the public site, are very positive about having Google as the Internet search provider. “The Google name is tantamount to quality,” says Reiss, “and we are seeing consistently improved stability and reliability in the search function. The Google Appliance provides much better speed and accuracy in search results and the GNSI team can customize the look and feel of the interface for the FDA.”

As a technology solutions provider, GNSI emphasized how little it takes to operate the Google Search Appliance. “There was not much to do to get the crawl up and running,” Reiss recalls. GNSI configured the Search Appliance and Domain Name Server (DNS) in such a way that indexing bandwidth is also very low. GNSI provided indexing rules and defined the Collection definition and Keymatches. GNSI also configured it to allow sorting by date of search results and customized the look and feel of the search results for FDA requirements.