SOLICITATION NOTICE
R -- RFI to provide access to a commercial search engine's application program interfaces (APIs) - HEIAA-1-13-0006
- Notice Date
- 7/11/2013
- Notice Type
- Presolicitation
- NAICS
- 511210
— Software Publishers
- Contracting Office
- General Services Administration, Office of Government-wide Policy, Office of Acquisition Policy, 1800 F Street NW, Room 4006, Washington, District of Columbia, 20405
- ZIP Code
- 20405
- Solicitation Number
- HEIAA-1-13-0006
- Point of Contact
- Vivian M. Fields, Phone: 2025011741
- E-Mail Address
-
vivian.fields@gsa.gov
(vivian.fields@gsa.gov)
- Small Business Set-Aside
- N/A
- Description
- Request for Information Office of Citizen Services and Innovative Technologies (OCSIT) U.S. General Services Administration USASearch Access to a Commercial Search Engine’s APIs Request For Information HEIAA-1-13-0006 1.0 SUBJECT Request for Information (RFI) to provide access to a commercial search engine’s application program interfaces (APIs). 2.0 SUMMARY The General Services Administration’s Office of Citizen Services and Innovative Technologies (OCSIT) invites interested parties to submit a written response to the attached RFI. The RFI’s intent is to obtain the rights for the USASearch application to use a commercial search engine’s application program interfaces (API) to help searchers on federal, state, local, territorial and tribal government websites find relevant information. 3.0 BACKGROUND INFORMATION OCSIT is the sponsoring organization for USASearch. For over ten years, USASearch has transformed the public’s search experience and saved government agencies valuable resources and money by providing site search services for government websites. The USASearch application powers the search box on over 1,500 federal, state, local, tribal, and territorial government websites including the following sites, among others: ● Federal—USA.gov and its Spanish-language counterpart GobiernoUSA.gov, Social Security Administration, U.S. Courts, White House, and the departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Defense, Homeland Security, HUD, Interior, and Labor; ● State—The state websites of Hawaii, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Michigan, North Carolina, Rhode Island, South Carolina, and Washington; and ● Local—Broward County, FL, and the cities of Bloomington, MN, Boulder, CO, and Reno, NV. The USASearch application delivers search results on agency websites using one of three methods. ● Most search results are hosted at search.usa.gov/search?affiliate=agency. Example: Defense.gov. ● Some agencies use the hosted results, but opt to mask their domains for search.agency.gov. Example: WhiteHouse.gov. ● A few agencies opt to use an API. JSON, JSON-P, and XML are supported. Example: RI.gov. 4.0 OBJECTIVES The USASearch application requires access to a commercial search engine’s search results via an API, including but not limited to a web index. The following capabilities must be supported. ● The provider must: ○ Allow USASearch to append results from its own indexes of government-centric content to the commercial search engine’s results. ○ Allow USASearch to cache search results for at least one hour. ○ Not place any advertising in the API search results nor require USASearch to place it on the search results pages. (A logo can be placed on the search results page for attribution.) ● The provider’s web index must: ○ Contain standard web file formats, including HTML, PDF, Microsoft Office (Word, Excel, and PowerPoint), rich text, text, and XML files, among others. ○ Conform to and support web crawling and indexing standards and protocols, including UTF-8 encoding, meta elements, robots.txt, and XML sitemaps. ○ Be updated frequently (that is, hourly, daily, or weekly depending on the site’s popularity and update cycle) and provide a high level of both recall and precision. ○ Retrieve semantically similar results, including but not limited to, singular/plural variants, synonyms, abbreviations and acronyms, compound words, and punctuation and diacritics. ● The provider’s API must: ○ Provide search results in a standard endpoint (currently JSON) and support a HTTP GET request length of at least 2000 bytes. ○ Provide access to the following data in multiple languages, including but not limited to, English and Spanish. ■ Result counts ■ Spelling suggestions ■ Query overrides ■ Keyword in context highlighting ■ Search results with a title, description, and URL ○ Provide the ability to limit results by the following input parameters and operators. ■ Sites, domains, URLs, or roll-ups of multiple sites or domains (both to include and exclude) ■ Language, including but not limited to, English and Spanish ○ Be able to support the following performance metrics. ■ Support submission of at least 100 million queries per month with bursts of 100 queries per second by USASearch ■ Return results in under 400 milliseconds for 95% latency ■ Maintain at least a 99.95% uptime The following capabilities are desired, but not required. ● Provide the ability to page through the complete set of results for each query (that is, the API should not have a cap on a number of results). ● Support a search across all *.gov, *.fed.us, and *.mil web pages plus the more than 10,000 local, state, and federal government web pages from other top-level domains (TLDs), such as.com,.edu, and.org (see, for example, search results on USA.gov and GobiernoUSA.gov). And, support updates to USASearch’s list of government websites with other TLDs on a quarterly or more frequent basis. ● Provide access to additional indexes such as images, videos, news, and maps, among others. ● Provide the ability to add newly published URLs to the web index on demand and assure that these URLs stay in the web index. ● Support searches over three directory levels deep (that is, return results for a search on site:agency.gov/folder1/folder2/folder3 ) ● Provide timestamps for search results. ● Provide suggestions for related search and type-ahead search terms on a per-site basis. ● Provide the ability to limit results by the following input parameters and operators. ○ Index (if there are multiple indexes) ○ File type ○ Boolean, wildcards, and exact phrases ○ Safe search (that is, the ability to filter sexually explicit or other adult content) ● Provide a point of contact for technical support. ● Support integration of USASearch with webmaster tools. That is, USASearch can use webmaster tools on behalf of government sites that use USASearch without each site explicitly granting USASearch this permission or signing up itself. ● If there is a cap on the number of transactions, allow USASearch to configure quotas based on the number of queries on a per user. And, allow agencies to purchase additional queries directly from the provider when they exceed the established quotas. 5.0 SAMPLE RESPONSE OUTLINE Following is a suggested outline and page counts for a response to this RFI. This outline is intended to minimize the respondent’s effort and structure responses to facilitate analysis by the government. Respondents are free to develop their responses as they see fit. 5.1 Company Information and Expertise (1-4 pages) ● Briefly describe your company, headquarters location, products and services, history, ownership, leadership, financial information, and any other facts and figures you deem relevant. ● Provide company name and address, and two points of contact, including name, title, phone, fax, and e-mail address. ● Describe any projects that you’ve been involved with that are similar in scope and concept to what is described in this RFI, and any relevant lessons learned. 5.2 The Offering (5-12 pages) The government is seeking responses from qualified providers that address the (a) required and (b) desired capabilities described in the objectives. You are invited to answer each of the bullets. You may answer each question individually or provide a consolidated answer to related questions. Also, you may provide references to any information accessible to the government that address these directed topics (such as links to web pages or additional materials). 5.3 Pricing Information The respondent should provide detailed pricing information. Ideally, it will be no cost or low cost with a flat fee for an unlimited number of monthly transactions. Any discount applied to the rates should be clearly identified. Pricing should be broken out, as needed, for each index or API (such as web, images, videos, news, or maps). You should describe exactly what it is you are offering the government at this cost. The total written response should not exceed 15 pages. 6.0 PERIOD OF PERFORMANCE The period of performance shall be comprised of a Base Period and four (4) one year options as follows: Base Period: Date of award - 12 months Option One 12 months Option Two 12 months Option Three 12 months Option Four 12 months 7.0 CONTACT INFORMATION & INFORMATION EXCHANGE All information received in response to this RFI marked Proprietary will be handled accordingly. Responses to the RFI will not be returned. Responders are solely responsible for all expenses associated with responding to this RFI. The due date of the RFI is August 30, 2013 by 5:00 PM. Responses should be sent electronically to the Contracting Ofifcer via email at vivian.fields@gsa.gov using Microsoft Word and PDF attachments. You may also submit supplemental hardcopy materials such as brochures, etc. to the point of contact. Questions regarding the RFI are to be submitted to the Contracting Officer, via email above, no later than August 9, 2013. The Contracting Officer Representative (COR) for this RFI will provide all assistance and clarification in meeting the requirements of the RFI is: Ammie Farraj Feijoo Program Manager 1800 F ST NW Washington, DC 20405 ammie.farrajfeijoo@gsa.gov CONTRACTING OFFICER Vivian Fields Contracting Officer GSA 1800 F St NW Washington, DC 20405 Vivian.Fields@gsa.gov If GSA is interested in the solution you offer, we will contact you. You may be requested to provide additional information or details based on your initial submittals. GSA will consider meeting individually about this RFI with respondents based on the information submitted in response to this RFI. If GSA engages in such meetings, it will provide that opportunity equally to all respondents. GSA reserves the right to move forward with one solution, more than one solution, or no solution at all, in response to this RFI.
- Web Link
-
FBO.gov Permalink
(https://www.fbo.gov/spg/GSA/OGP/OAP/HEIAA-1-13-0006/listing.html)
- Place of Performance
- Address: 1800 F Street NW, Washington, District of Columbia, 20405, United States
- Zip Code: 20405
- Zip Code: 20405
- Record
- SN03114175-W 20130713/130711235538-f7994f9f3ac5318723f078d691ea6adc (fbodaily.com)
- Source
-
FedBizOpps Link to This Notice
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