There's less than a week left to bid on The General Services Administration's five-year search services job for the FirstGov site. Washington Technology reports that GSA aims to replace the current enterprise-based search service with new Web-based search services. This time, they're after a company that actually considers search technology its bread 'n' butter, as opposed to hiring some monster IT firm to subcontract the work.

Now, AT&T Government Markets of Washington hosts FirstGov and provides security services, and its subcontractor, Fast Search and Transfer Inc. of Foster City, CA. provides the search engine.

GSA will award the gig to three or more vendors for delivery, operation and development of search engine services for the federal government’s official portal. Launch of the revamped site is set for no later than Feb. 1, 2006; news and image search capabilities are planned for a couple months afterwards.

Well, if anything this sounds more streamlined than the typical big contractor approach by which some goliath subs work out to a smaller firm, and so on, and so on -- which, of course, tags on extra cost with each intermediary.

Government | Vendors & Consultants
Kate Kaye's blog | email this page | delicious | digg | technorati