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 225 Main Street Newington, CT 06111 860 594 0220 www.arrl.org/