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