To: ODV
At the July Board meeting, the Board requested some
better options for the search functions on the ARRL Web Site. Jon Bloom, Hugh
Brower and Tom Hogerty have recommended the option outlined below which we plan
to implement by mid-November.
Here is the Executive Summary of that report along with the complete
document from Jon and his staff.
EXECUTIVE
SUMMARY
Providing a robust search capability on a corporate website is a major
undertaking, according to several major research organizations. ARRL has in
the past used a number of free ‘shareware’ search tools to provide
search capabilities on ARRLWeb. As presently configured these are not well
suited to such a large site as ARRL’s (11,000+ documents, one million
hits per day).
Sites with a large number of content pages typically require
specialized search tools from commercial vendors. Vendor solutions come as
either software which runs on a customer’s servers, or as an all-in-one
hardware + software package. Because of the overhead that a search engine
requires, we recommend that the search function be separated from the physical
ARRLWeb server.
ARRL Web/Software Development Department has identified the Google Mini
“appliance” as the best overall solution to the limitations of the
current search tool. Sold by Google, the most popular search engine on the
Internet, the Mini will allow the ARRL site to be indexed and searchable in the
same manner as the current Google.com site searches the entire Internet.
The cost of this appliance is $3,000 to purchase and it will require
external web hosting at an approximate cost of $100 per month.
We will implement this solution with a target completion date of
November 11, 2005.
The attached document describes the background and analysis that led us
to this conclusion.
Harold Kramer, WJ1B
Chief Operating Officer
ARRL - The National Association for Amateur Radio
860 594 0220