This past January, the site reverted to a Web search model. FirstGov now uses Vivisimo Inc.'s Clusty Web search technology with Microsoft Corp.'s MSN Web index. MSN already crawls all the government sites for its own index.

"We are using the MSN index filtered for government sites rather than doing any crawling ourselves," says Keating. "Rather than reinvent the wheel, we get the data from somebody who already does it really well."

As a result, the GSA has replaced the 24 servers it was using for the FirstGov site with a service hosted by Pittsburgh-based Vivisimo, cutting its costs in half. In the process, the number of official government documents available through the site has increased from 8 million to 40 million. It also provides searchers with easier access to relevant information by clustering the search results by category. For example, the search results page now has a tab listing federal forms that match the query.

"We still use [Autonomy's K2] enterprise search for the GSA.gov site," says M.J. Pizella, associate administrator of the GSA's Office of Citizen Services and Communications. "But for FirstGov, we wanted to get information quicker, without having to get into the agency sites, and Web search allows us to do that."

Robb is a Computerworld contributing writer in Los Angeles.