The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is an agency of the
Challenges
With millions of users on the public internet that needs ready access to information and documents of all kinds, along with its internal work force, NASA relyies heavily on enterprise search solutions, which can help find the relevant information. NASA has over eleven million public web assets and this was a challenge to any search engine to index/refresh in a schedule frequency and provide an effective relevance in the search results.
Solutions
NASA awarded the "Portal Project contract" to eTouch and as part of this contract one of the tasks was to consolidate all 3,000 of the space agency's Web sites and make them accessible through a single portal. NASA's information resources are vast - more than eleven millions web resources, thousands of databases and electronic repositories, terabytes of mission and planetary data, and millions of online reports - a wealth of electronic information in different formats.
To address the above challenge, eTouch considered various industry leading vendor products and selected the Google Search Appliance 8008 (GSA 8008) and recommended NASA to use this solution. After implementation of GSA 8008 the relevance of search results have become very high and the user requests on search application have gone up tremendously. The Appliance met the requirement of 180 queries per min with initial 3M indexed documents.
Results
With the right search solution like the Google Search Appliance, NASA now manages its information more effectively and can share it across different NASA centers and user communities. With an easy way to create multiple virtual collections, the NASA solution has provided more targeted search solutions to different NASA centers/facilities.
