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While many organizations switch from a Web search to an enterprise search engine, the FirstGov portal has gone the other way. FirstGov, which acts as the official home page for the U.S federal government, is managed by the General Services Administration.

When the site launched in the fall of 2000, it used a custom search engine created by a foundation established by Eric Brewer, founder of search engine pioneer Inktomi. Then, in the spring of 2002, the site started using an enterprise search engine from Fast Search & Transfer that would index the data contained within all the government agency sites.

"We were crawling all the government sites ourselves," says Bob Keating, the GSA's search and program manager. "The model didn't scale well to what we needed to do in searching the entire government."