News Releases
GSA Awards Contract to AT&T Business Services For FirstGov's New Search EngineGSA #9928 March 7, 2002 Washington, DC - Today, the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) awarded a contract to AT&T Business Services for the new FirstGov.gov search engine. AT&T will use the FAST Search and Transfer search engine to search over 51 million pages of federal and state government information. The contract is for a period of one year plus four one-year options to renew. The value of the contract is approximately $2 million a year. The scalability of the FAST Search and Transfer platform will allow FirstGov to rapidly expand the number of websites it spiders from Federal, State, and local governments. In addition to being able to search HTML pages, citizens will be able to search government databases, PDF documents and other file formats. In the future, citizens will be able to request search results to be displayed by category, subject and agency. The configurability and support for Web services offered by this platform will allow FirstGov affiliates to seamlessly integrate with FirstGov search services. This contract is a commercial item acquisition and the result of a full and open competition. Proposal evaluation was conducted by a cross-agency team that included representatives from the GSA, Department of Defense, Department of Commerce and independent third party experts. FirstGov is the U.S. Government's official gateway to online government transactions, services and information. During 2001, FirstGov received 50 million hits. This interagency initiative is managed by the U.S. General Services Administration. For the past 18 months, the Federal Search Foundation has provided the search engine, at no cost to the federal government, to help serve as a catalyst for the FirstGov initiative. The existing search engine will remain in place until March 31, 2002. GSA is a centralized federal procurement and property management agency created by Congress to improve government efficiency and help federal agencies better serve the public. It acquires, on behalf of federal agencies, office space, equipment, telecommunications, information technology, supplies and services. GSA, comprised of 14,000 associates, provides services and solutions for the office operations of over 1 million federal workers located in 8,300 government -owned and leased buildings.
Last Reviewed 2/11/2008
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