SPECIAL NOTICE
D -- FirstGov Search Services
- Notice Date
- 1/2/2002
- Notice Type
- Special Notice
- Contracting Office
- General Services Administration, Office of Government-wide Policy, Office of Acquisition Policy, 1800 F Street NW Room 4012, Washington, DC, 20405
- ZIP Code
- 20405
- Solicitation Number
- GS00A02PDR0002
- Response Due
- 1/17/2002
- Archive Date
- 2/1/2002
- Point of Contact
- Michael Jackson, Contracting Officer, Phone (202) 208-4949, Fax (202) 501-3161,
- E-Mail Address
-
michael.jackson@gsa.gov
- Description
- The General Services Administration, Office of FirstGov, has a requirement for FirstGov Search Services. Specifically, FirstGov provides a single high-level portal to all Federal and State Government websites. As one service of FirstGov, a search capability is provided to allow users to locate content on Government websites. The current contract for search technology is expiring in the near future. This procurement is intended to provide replacement search capabilities and to add additional search functionality that has been requested by the agency clients. The contractor shall provide the following services: Organization of SOW & Responses Instructions to Responders Responses Responses to the SOW should be divided into three sections: Required Services and Capabilities, Desirable Services and Capabilities, and Supporting Materials. Responders are instructed to provide succinct responses that describe the specific terms, performance specifications, etc. that substantiate the responder?s claim to meet the requirement. References to supporting materials to provide further context are encouraged. Term of Contract This contract will be for a term of one year. The Government may choose to extend the contract for up to 4 additional option years, with renewal on a yearly basis. The Government will notify the vendor in writing of its intent to extend, a minimum of 30 days in advance of the current expiration period. Evaluation Criteria The winning proposal will be evaluated on technical capability, completeness of solution, past performance, and price. Proposals will first be checked to make sure that they meet the Mandatory Qualifications. Any proposals that do not meet the Mandatory Qualifications will not be considered further. The technical proposal will be evaluated separately from the cost proposal. The Government will evaluate each technical response item and assign a numerical value that indicates the degree to which the Government believes that the response meets/exceeds the requirement. This numerical value will be multiplied by a predetermined "importance factor" that indicates the relative importance of the particular requirement to the Government. The sum of the values derived from this calculation will be used as the total point score to rank the technical proposals. Technical proposals that are in the top 25% of point scores for required functionality will move forward to the cost evaluation phase. Cost proposals will be evaluated on a total cost for the projected 5 year life of the contract, using a "time value of money" calculation, such that costs in early years are considered to be more expensive than the same dollar costs that occur in later years. The Government reserves the right to choose not to accept any of the proposals. Completeness of Solution It is possible that no single vendor will be able to provide a solution that fully addresses all of the required services and capabilities of Section One of this Statement of Work. Because the various requirements will have different relative importance in the evaluation, the Government may choose a solution that does not fully address all of the Required Services and Capabilities, but is still, in the opinion of the Government, the best overall solution. In this case, the Government may elect to meet these requirements using other resources outside the scope of this procurement. Mandatory Qualifications, which if not met, will disqualify the proposal from further consideration, are clearly identified in the Statement of Work. Assumptions For pricing purposes the following assumptions should be used: URL under Index Fiscal Year Growth Cumulative URLs FY 2002 ~50,000,000 50,000,000 FY 2003 ~50,000,000 100,000,000 FY 2004 ~50,000,000 150,000,000 FY 2005 ~50,000,000 200,000,000 FY 2006 0 200,000,000 Usage and Demand Assumptions, 2002-2006 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 Visits 15,808,000 16,598,400 17,096,352 17,438,279 17,612,662 Page Views 58,448,000 61,370,400 63,211,512 64,475,742 65,120,500 Bytes 736 gigabytes 773 gigabytes 796 gigabytes 812 gigabytes 820 gigabytes Avg Mnthly Page Views 4,870,667 5,114,200.00 5,267,626 5,372,978.52 5,426,708 Pages in 000s 4,871 5,114 5,268 5,372 5,427 Pricing Pricing information should be clearly indicate the costs to provide all of the Mandatory Qualifications from Section Three and costs for capabilities that the vendor is able to provide from Section Four (Required Services and Capabilities). Responders may optionally provide a separate pricing schedule to provide features and services for Section Five (Desirable Services and Capabilities). Where items are dependent on other optional Section Five capabilities, these dependencies should be clearly identified. Pricing should be provided to support guaranteed uptime of 99.5% based on a 24/7/365 schedule. The final contract will include penalties to be levied should the availability requirement not be met. The vendor should specify any hardware, operating practices, or configuration requirement to meet the required service level. Pricing should be based on the volumes specified in Section 2.2.5 "Assumptions". Pricing should be provided in the following format for summary information. Additional detailed information on pricing variations based on volumes or options the vendor wishes to offer to the government can also be included in a separate section. Option Years Cost Item Year 1 Year 2 Year 3 Year 4 Year 5 Comments One time costs Training, equipment leasing during cutover, transportation fees, etc. License Fees Operating Costs Additional Hardware/Software Other Costs (Specify) Government Furnished Equipment FirstGov has a number of Sun E250, E220, and A1000 computers and other equipment that they desire to continue using. See Schedule of Equipment in Appendix A. This equipment will be available for the vendor to use in providing the required solution. The vendor is not required to use this equipment, however, the vendor must specify any equipment necessary to meet the performance and functionality specifications provided herein. The vendor must provide separate line item pricing for this additional equipment. Note: The Government may choose to procure the equipment directly. Due to the fact that service to the existing FirstGov site can not be interrupted, the vendor will be required to provide equipment for a short time to run the new search software in parallel with the existing software, in order to demonstrate that the service availability levels and performance levels can be met. (See "Installation" under the Services section of Required Services and Capabilities below.) Contact Information and Schedule Responses due - - January 17, 2002 Award - - February 28, 2002 Installation - - March 31, 2002 Cut-over to live production - - March 31, 2002 Contracting Officer - - Michael O. Jackson Mandatory Qualifications Experience Vendors must be able to provide a reference installation with a minimum of 40 million pages under index in order to be considered. Any proposals from vendors that cannot meet this specific requirement will not be considered. The vendor should provide specific information describing their reference installation. The government may choose to directly verify the reference installation. Hosting The vendor must propose a turn-key solution that includes hosting of the hardware, and installation and maintenance, and operation of software. The solution must include the communication infrastructure necessary to spider and index the expected volumes of URLs/data and to provide search engine access for the expected number of search requests. (See Assumptions in section 2.2.5) Escrow of source code The vendor must supply a plan for uninterrupted service delivery in the event that the vendor exits the search business. The vendor and all his subcontractors must enter into an agreement to escrow the source code of all software provided in response to this document. Scalability The system should be scalable to handle an increase in the number of pages under index to 200 million without the response time for query increasing to more than .5 seconds per query, regardless of query complexity. The vendor must specify what additional hardware will be required to support this increase in capacity. The vendor must provide whatever hardware, in addition to that specified in this response at no additional charge to the Government in order to meet this specific response time Application Program Interface An API must be provided to allow integration of the existing FirstGov.gov web front-end with the specified search capabilities. The vendor must provide API documentation with their proposal response. Obsolescence The vendor shall set forth a plan by which the system provided shall not become obsolete. This plan must at least include software support and maintenance for the correction of errors and providing of all releases, versions, changes, modifications, improvements, and updates to the software and supporting systems and its documentation introduced during the life of the contract, including all renewals thereof. Support A support plan renewable yearly is required. Qualified and fully trained personnel must be available by phone 24/7/365 with the following response times: Normal business days, 8:00 - 5:00 pm (based on when the call is placed) Available by phone within 1 hour of placing call. Available on site within 2 hours of placing call if problem can not be resolved by phone within the first half hour. Weekends, holidays, and normal business days outside the hours of 8:00 - 5:00 pm (based on when the call is placed): Available by phone within 2 hour of placing call. Available on site within 4 hours of placing call if problem can not be resolved by phone within the first 2 hours. Installation The vendor must provide installation and configuration of all software in order to provide a complete working system to meet the initial performance requirements (.25 seconds per query on the ~50 million pages under index). This requirement includes installation of operating system software, backup and recovery software, utilities, and any other software necessary to make the proposed solution a "turn-key" operation. Use of Existing Hardware The existing hardware described in Appendix A will be in use by the current search technology until operation can be cut over to the new system, and service must be uninterrupted. The Government requires that there be a 30-day period of concurrent operation with the existing search technology still in place, during which time the vendor must meet the service level requirements. After that time, the full production operation can be cut over to the new solution, and installation can begin on the existing Government hardware. After the service level can be met for an additional 15 days on the existing Government hardware, the concurrent operation can be terminated. Since the Appendix A hardware will not be available to the vendor during the first 30 concurrent operation period, the vendor must provide the hardware necessary to operate the system in concurrent operation during the period specified. If the system is down for more than the allowed time according to the service level agreement during the concurrent period, the concurrent period will restart at the beginning once the system is returned to operational state. After 3 such restarts, the Government may, at its option, choose to restart additional times or to terminate the contract, at no cost to the Government. Hardware failures of equipment furnished by the Government will not be counted against service level agreement performance. Required Services and Capabilities Indexing 1.1.1.2 Indexing of web content in the following formats is required: HTML, PDF, Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft PowerPoint, ASCII (.txt), and XML. 1.1.1.3 The system must be able to crawl and index and make available the entire current FirstGov.gov indexed content (~50 million pages) in no more than seven (7) days using the existing server configurations. It is expected that the number of spidered pages will increase from the current ~50 million to ~200 million in the next 36 to 48 months. The vendor must assure that as the number of spidered pages increases the total time to index the collection does not exceed the seven day limit. The successful vendor will be required to demonstrate this capability during the final system acceptance phase. (See ?Installation? under the ?Services? section below.) 1.1.1.4 The system must be able to provide a maximum .25 second response time on any query of the current FirstGov.gov indexed content (~50 million pages) as measured on a client locally connected to the search server. A typical internet user of the search system must see a response time of no greater than 5 seconds. The successful vendor will be required to demonstrate this capability during the final system acceptance phase. (See ?Installation? under the ?Services? section below.) 1.1.1.5 The system must provide the capability to provide an on-demand re-index and scheduled (regularly scheduled (~0.1% of the total pages spidered or 50,000 pages) and one time scheduled) crawl of specified URL's in order to make those pages available in the index immediately without the need to wait for completion of a full index cycle. The regularly scheduled re-indexing crawls must be performed in a one hour period; one-time crawls must be available in minutes. In each of these cases, a search by a typical internet user must not employ search terms or results derived from the previous contents of any of these changed pages. 1.1.1.6 Indexing on the entire 65,536 character Unicode character set is required. 1.1.1.7 The system must provide the capability to index databases across the web via ODBC. 1.1.1.8 Rooting and stemming of words should be supported at indexing time so that there is no performance penalty at search time for searches that rely on roots/stems. (See searching below). 1.1.1.9 The system must support field level indexing for database content, XML content, and HTML (title, meta, h1, etc. tagged fields). 1.1.1.10 The system must provide a mechanism that ensures that links that are not accessible are removed from the index on a timely basis (at least weekly). Searching 1.1.1.11 Search results must be provided for display, ranked by relevance, with the search keywords provided in the context (KWIC) of a paragraph of the document. This is a required capability for HTML, PDF, and Microsoft Word content. The type of document found and its size must be indicated in the hit list. 1.1.1.12 The search engine must be able to categorize the search results according to a taxonomy of words and phrases. The vendor should specify whether their system requires a pre-defined taxonomy, can automatically generate a taxonomy, or both. 1.1.1.13 Search terms must be identified in the returned results list. 1.1.1.14 Searching on the entire 65,536 character Unicode character set is required. 1.1.1.15 The system must support field level searching for database content, XML content, and HTML (title, meta, h1, etc. tagged fields). It must be possible to return a query result set by combining field level query commands with full text query commands. 1.1.1.16 The system must support Boolean searches of full text and fielded content including AND, OR, and NOT. 1.1.1.17 Searches may be submitted as individual words, phrases, or sentences. The system must automatically recognize common phrases in the query and rank results containing those phrases higher than results containing the individual words that are not in the context of the phrase. For example, if the search phrase was "white house" then a document containing the phrase "George Bush lives in the White House" would be rated higher than one containing "Al's house is also white". 1.1.1.18 The system must allow for "rooting" and "stemming" of search terms, so a search containing the word "schooling" would return hits of documents containing "school", "schooled", etc. Other System Capabilities 1.1.1.19 The vendor must provide an interface that is accessible programmatically and across the web that will allow agency sites to submit queries and receive query results for inclusion in agency pages. 1.1.1.20 The system should provide collection of metrics on queries, information under index, and other useful statistics. The vendor should include with the proposal a description of the statistics collected and the available reports on those statistics. Services Training Administration training will be provided to a maximum of 5 persons designated by the Government to receive such training. Training will include written procedure on all aspects of system operation and maintenance including start-up, shutdown, backup, recovery and search software administration and configuration. Each person in training should have the opportunity to personally perform each system operation and to exercise each capability of search engine administration and configuration during the training sessions. Development Consulting The vendor will provide all assistance needed by FirstGov developers in integrating the existing FirstGov web front-end with the search engine. [Need to put specifics on the amount of assistance required or do time and materials]. The successful vendor will be required to create a ?web authoring standard? to describe to web content creators the most effective ways to markup their content to support indexing by the vendor?s product. An outline in table of contents format listing the topics that will be addressed in this standard should be included with this proposal response. Any costs for creating the ?web authoring standard? document should be included in the costs section of the proposal. Desirable Services and Capabilities Indexing Configurablility 1.1.1.21 While the content available across all of the government web sites is very diverse, it is possible to some extent to coordinate the content formatting and tagging across many of the sites in order to realize a higher relevancy on the query results. It is desirable that the search engine be highly configurable to allow the government to define the criteria by which search results will be ranked. A partial list of possible criteria that might affect rankings include: How recently the page content has been updated. Whether the agency name was mentioned in the query. Whether a query term appeared in a specially tagged area of the content (for example in an XML tag). How many times the term appeared within the content item. The number of times the item appeared within the content item as a percentage of the total number of words in the content. The similarity of the word order in the query as compared to the word order in the content item. How frequently the link has been accessed. The ?buy a word? strategy, where pages can be designated to be the highest relevance for specific words or phrases. There are undoubtedly many more ways to evaluate this. The vendor should describe the algorithms used for relevance ranking and also describe the extent to which these algorithms are configurable. Indicate at what point the configuration options take effect (index time, query time, etc.) and any effects on performance or cost. 1.1.1.22 It is desirable that bound phrases, synonyms, proper nouns, etc., be configurable for indexing on a per domain or per URL list basis. For example, the word ?interference? has totally different synonyms when indexing content from the Patent and Trademark Office than when indexing content from the Federal Communications Commission.
- Record
- SN20020104/00010899-020103090420 (fbodaily.com)
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