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Overview
A bureau of the U.S. Department of the Interior, The National Park Service (NPS) has protected America’s parks and monuments since 1916. In addition to promoting and preserving designated national parklands, the NPS also serves as guardian of diverse cultural and recreational resources; strives to be an environmental advocate and a leader in the parks and preservation and open space communities.

The National Park System comprises 386 areas of national significance that have gained special recognition and protection through various acts of Congress. NPS oversees more than 83 million acres in 49 states, the District of Columbia, American Samoa, Guam, Puerto Rico, Saipan, and the Virgin Islands. There are 22,000 employees in the bureau. The website http://www.nps.gov contains more than six million pages, and receives between 200,000 and 300,000 visitors each day.

The Challenge
Carl Chitwood, NPS Enterprise Web Manager, says most people search by geographical area or by topic. But the federal government’s proprietary search tool, FirstGov, was not delivering complete or accurate results, which meant the NPS was hearing from frustrated users. “We used to get 30 to 40 complaints a day, plus lots of ‘I can’t find this’ inquiries, which took a lot of our staff time to deal with,” he recalls. In addition, he says, the existing solution “wasn’t capable of the managing and reporting capabilities that I knew we needed. But I knew we weren’t going to build it ourselves. Once we implemented the search and integrated it with the feedback page the email inquiries went from an average of 40 a day to 2.”

The Solution
Chitwood had worked as the technical architect of the FirstGov search, so he was familiar with the centralized search application available for federal agencies. He knew what features he wanted: an administration console, distributed content management, and robust reporting tools. When he learned that the Google Search Appliance offered all of these capabilities he was eager to see it in action.

End Result
The NPS received the Appliance on a Thursday, Chitwood recalls, “and we went live with it the next Tuesday. Installing it didn’t even interfere with our heavy Friday workload.” He also notes that the initial plan was to roll out the Search Appliance about three weeks later, but “we just couldn’t wait after seeing it in action. It was so easy to set up, and we immediately saw enormously improved relevance.”

Since then, Chitwood reports “we have not needed a minute of tech support.” As for the Search Appliance features, the NPS takes advantage of the fact that different content owners can manage their own areas easily. “The only time they need to change it is when a new site goes live,” he says. “We set it once, and then forget it.”

Chitwood is enthusiastic about two features in particular: keymatching and synonym matching. Both enable the NPS team to guide users to relevant information from their huge database of states, parks, regions, and job listings based on the search terms people use. “We use these features a lot,” he says. “they were easy to set up, and now we can deliver more detailed information in response to a query. Whether users search for a park’s full name or an abbreviation, for example, Google will serve up a full park profile.”

Another feature of the Google Search Appliance Chitwood has come to appreciate is the ability to learn from what people are searching for in order to develop new content areas. “We didn’t know that people are looking for jobs at NPS.gov,” but they are – so his team has created a job landing page because of the volume of those search queries. In addition, Chitwood says clearly understanding queries has led to new thematic sections. “Of course we had sections for ‘camping’ and ‘hiking’ already, but would never have guessed that ‘weddings’ was such a big search topic.” Having this sort of real-world search data “helps focus our team on improving navigation and providing a better user experience,” he says.

Since the initial implementation on nps.gov, Chitwood’s team has purchased and implemented Google search on its intranet site as well. The new server used on the intranet includes even more features that NPS uses such as URL insertion and crawling priorities. “Now, when we push a new page on our intranet, we can immediately crawl and index that page using the Freshness Tuning application,” he reports.

Chitwood concludes that the implementation has been wholly successful. “We don’t have to respond to ‘I can’t find it’ comments any longer,” he says. “People clearly feel they are getting all the information they want from the NPS, because the Google Search Appliance provides that much better of a search solution. We might say it bolsters our mission to educate and delight citizens about everything the National Park Service offers.”

About the Google Search Appliance
The Google Search Appliance is an integrated corporate search solution that extends Google’s award-winning search technology to intranets and websites. The Google Search Appliance is available in three models: the GB-1001 for departments and mid-sized companies; the GB-5005 for dedicated, high-priority search services such as customer-facing websites and company-wide intranet applications; and the GB-8008 for centralized deployments supporting global business units. For more information, visit http://www.google.com/enterprise/gsa/.

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