Adhere Solutions is a Google Enterprise Partner providing products and services that help organizations accelerate their adoption of Google technologies and cloud computing. Adhere's team of consultants help customers leverage Google's Enterprise Search products, Google Maps, and Google Apps to improve access to information, communication, and productivity.
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is an agency of the federal government responsible for protecting consumers and preventing unfair and anti-competitive business practices.
Challenges
In an effort to make the one million documents it serves on its website more accessible and transparent to the public, the FTC determined it was necessary to modernize search, the most widely used service on the commission's site, www.ftc.gov .
Prior to selecting the Google Search Appliance, the FTC relied on legacy search technology that did not handle the demands of more than 13 million monthly pageviews. The FTC needed to deliver a search service that could unify access to public information stored and managed across multiple business units. They also needed a search results interface that would be familiar to a diverse group of users including business researchers, academics, FTC employees, and the general public.
Solutions
The FTC Web Team, along with stakeholders from the Office of Public Affairs conducted an analysis to determine the most efficient external web search engine for their newly-designed website. Based on an internal analysis, the Commission decided to purchase two Google GB-1001 Search Appliances, one to support the production site search service and the second appliance to serve as fail over support.
Knowing they wanted to go beyond the default Google Search Appliance capabilities and provide a custom Universal Search experience, the FTC contracted with Adhere Solutions to install the appliances, customize the search experience according to the Commission’s specifications and provide annual tuning and maintenance services.
Results
The FTC now greets is users with a Universal Search interface that features results from multiple repositories including consumer and business information, policy documents, news, forms, publications and cases to millions monthly visitors.
Since it was installed in October 2008, the FTC has been pleased with how well the Google Search Appliance has performed, with one executive, Barri Hutchins, INET Specialist and Webmaster noting "Adhere Solutions were a pleasure to deal with: their expertise, professionalism and responsiveness have ensured that we can get the best from Google technologies. Now our users can find information from across the FTC websites from one search box.”
