70 -- SEARCH SERVICE SOLUTIONS RFI

Notice Date

June 14, 2001

Contracting Office

General Services Administration, Federal Technology Service (FTS), IT Acquisition Service Center (TFL), 18th & F Streets, NW, Room 2024, Washington, DC, 20405

ZIP Code

20405

Solicitation Number

GS0001ACP3329

Response Due

July 16, 2001

Point of Contact

Emil Loczko, Contracting Officer, Phone (202) 219-0891, Fax (202) 501-4681, Email emil.loczko@gsa.gov -- Emil Loczko, Contracting Officer, Phone (202) 219-0891, Fax (202) 501-4681, Email emil.loczko@gsa.gov

Description

REQUEST FOR INFORMATION (RFI) SEARCH SERVICE SOLUTIONS Purpose The Office of FirstGov at the General Services Administration (GSA) requests information about search service solutions from interested parties. FirstGov plans to contract for new search services for our FirstGov.gov website at the conclusion of the donation of search services from the Federal Search Foundation. This RFI is the next step in the process of preparing for our migration to contracted search services. We have not yet prepared our formal procurement plan. We seek comments from a) industry, including vendors of relevant products and services as well as integrators, implementers, and consultants; b) the research community, particularly concerning assessments of existing search methodologies and implementations as well as discussions of trends that may affect our selection and implementation during the next 2-3 years; c) other organizations, especially other governments and government agencies that have implemented search services for their own use, and d) other third-parties that can provide independent reference, reviews, or evaluations. We are particularly interested in receiving descriptions of actual case studies in which search services have been implemented, including the definitions of the problem and response, the technical configuration of the solution, the corresponding responsibilities of the vendor and client, the schedules for implementation, and the pricing for development, construction, maintenance and enhancement. Responses are encouraged from business concerns eligible to participate in the programs identified in Federal Acquisition Regulations (FAR) Part 19. Background about FirstGov The Office of FirstGov manages the federal web portal known as FirstGov.gov (the URL is www.firstgov.gov). Currently, FirstGov relies on a temporary gift of search services from The Federal Search Foundation (Fed-Search) which uses Inktomi search technology to crawl and index all publicly available U.S. Government websites (currently more than 30 million pages, primarily the .gov, .mil, and fed.us Top Level Domains). FirstGov will soon include all primary State government websites as well (initially estimated at 15 million pages). FirstGov crawls and indexes only those U.S. Government websites that are publicly accessible. This specifically excludes intranet systems and networks containing protected or classified information. Summary of our future requirements At minimum, FirstGov will require a comprehensive search service solution able to crawl and index all publicly accessible U.S. Government and State government websites. The service must also be able to scale easily to include other public sector websites. And, it must be adaptable to crawling and indexing other unstructured electronic information as well, such as U.S. Government databases not yet accessible via the Internet. In addition to the search service itself, the U.S. Government is interested in obtaining a full range of capabilities for using the information stored in the index for purposes other than displaying the results on the website. Responses might include methods for easily creating databases of quantitative information and/or visual displays of the hierarchical structures of the networks of websites, from Cabinet Departments down through Bureaus, Divisions, Offices, and Programs, depending upon the relevant organizational structures. This may also include the ability to map the occurrences of and/or clustering of keywords. If possible, this should be extensible in the future to map concepts as well as keywords. The Government is also interested in learning about other possible types of information that might be extracted from the search database and possible uses for it. The vendor is not required to provide the U.S. Government with access to any proprietary algorithms used by the vendor in powering the original search service itself. FirstGov is interested in a comprehensive solution including search engine software, support and maintenance (24 hours, 7 days a week). Responses to this RFI Responses to this request for information should include specific technical and management information on the solution?s Results, Search, Index, Security, and Administration/Configuration functionality. Responses should cover specifics. FirstGov is not specifying minimum requirements in the following areas at this time, however, it recommends addressing the following: Description  Description of how crawling is accomplished, information is stored, and searches are performed; Include information about deep crawl, instant indexing, frames support, image maps, robots.txt, meta robots tags, how link popularity helps deep crawl, learns frequency;  Type of manipulation done at time of query, including relevancy solution;  Information on navigation facilities including clustering, relevancy ranking, automated document summarization and query by example;  Description of information contained in the displayed result such as document title, file name, date, byte size, extract of the document, where document resides, etc.;  Information on index of the search products with user-definable fields such as author, title, date; subsets of searchable information resulting from ability to capture queries and search results;  Information on configuration with various server software (e.g., Netscape Enterprise, Microsoft Internet Information, and Lotus Domino Enterprise);  Plug-and-play functions;  Documentation and technical support including specifying results and document presentation; Experience  Any locations (with URL addresses) where your solution has been implemented; referrals to posted information related to your solution; Requirements  Hardware, software, or bandwidth requirements that the government would have to pay for either through government furnished equipment or through contract;  Any platforms required to support the solution;  Amount of time required to produce a precise result; Functionality (If Applicable)  Ability for user interface to allow customization of sort order, number of returns per page, date or relevancy, and other;  Personalization, including alerts, automatic delivery and updates to predefined profiles.  Any tools enabling user identification of most frequently sought references for a given source;  Any tools that will identify most popular result for a given search term;  Automatic highlighting of search terms and linguistic and thesaurus equivalents;  Search and query capabilities such as keyword, query by example, natural language, spelling error override, combination of natural language in various tense and form, Boolean, proximity operators, or others;  Ability for users to search all, part, or specific repositories of information, including databases;  Advanced query expansion and thesaurus expansion, custom thesaurus creation;  Use of full body text, stop words, meta-description and meta-keywords, ALT text and comments, and stemming in Indexing.  Automatic updates of indexes and manual indexing options;  Document indexing, classification, and retrieval;  Formats understood and indexed; Types of documents indexed (e.g. text, .pdf, etc.)  Multiple domain indexing against different collections;  Online incremental indexing with index changes for only new, updated, or deleted documents;  Ability to perform unscheduled mini-crawls.  Releasable information assuring the security of the system and its information at all times;  User-friendly interface;  Scalability to all levels of government information;  Support for administration from any browser;  Multi-language capabilities;  Proven interoperability with other products, if any;  Compliance with accessibility standards established by the Access Board per Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act. Submissions Description of respondent and contact information. Responses should include, at a minimum: name of company or concern, address and point of contact information including phone and e-mail, brief description of company or concern, and, if applicable, type of vendor (e.g. integrator, service provider, software vendor). Type and length of submission. Specifications providing details of the technical search engine solution and related management requirements are preferred over promotional literature. Limit electronic responses to the equivalent of 20 pages with any additional information submitted in hardcopy not to exceed one three inch, three-ring binder. Pricing. Vendors are encouraged to provide basic pricing information for software, support, and maintenance. Send to: Responses, either electronic or hardcopy or both, should refer to ?Search Service Solutions RFI.? Send electronic responses to emil.loczko@gsa.gov and additional printed matter should be sent to U. S. General Services Administration, FTS/TFFL Room 2024, 1800 F Street, N.W, Washington, DC 20405. Due date: July 16, 2001 Notice of disclaimer: This is not a request for proposal (RFP) and the government does not intend to pay for any information provided. Receipt of responses will not be acknowledged.

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Record

Loren Data Corp. 20010618/70SOL008.HTM (D-165 SN50O9S2)