The Australian Government Information Management Office (AGIMO)
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The Organisation
The Australian Government Information Management Office (AGIMO) is responsible for the government's online entry point; www.australia.gov.au. AGIMO works across government to maintain Australia's position as a leader in the application of information technology. It fosters the efficient and effective use of information and communications technology by Australian government departments and agencies. It provides strategic advice, activities and representation relating to the productive application of ICT to government administration, information and services.
The Challenge
A whole-of-government search solution that allows users to find information on government policies and programs across all Commonwealth government websites.
The solution had to provide high quality results, be managed externally by professionals, be easy to administer and provide useful data logs for analysis.
The Solution
In January 2007, Funnelback re-won the tender to provide search for www.australia.gov.au. This is a fully hosted service. The search service allows citizens to search for and find valuable information on government policies and programs across the breadth of all Australian government websites. It thereby enhances the effectiveness of government web information and the impact of program delivery.
The popularity of the service has more than doubled since it began in early 2004. There are now over 1.5 million search queries being processed by Funnelback on the www.australia.gov.au website each year.
Funnelback is continuing to work with AGIMO to further roll out the service as part of AGIMO's implementation of Australia's e-government strategy.
Agency Search
Commonwealth agencies are able to leverage off the www.australia.gov.au search index to provide search for their own websites. There are over 20 agencies participating in this search service including www.health.gov.au, www.finance.gov.au, www.ga.gov.au, www.humanservices.gov.au, and www.comcare.gov.au. The advanced search feature on www.australia.gov.au has the ability to search through these agency scopes, while the default search covers content from all Commonwealth government websites. Over 400,000 agency search queries are processed by Funnelback each month.
Comprehensive Content
Each week, an up to date index of www.australia.gov.au is compiled from a schedule of full and incremental crawls, with approximately 2.3 million documents indexed in each full crawl.
Fresh Content
The Funnelback search service performs a refresh crawl and index of the top 400,000 web pages on all Australian Government websites each weeknight to ensure the content available for search is always fresh.
Media Alerts
A media release search service is available at www.australia.gov.au/media. Users can subscribe by providing an email address and they will be alerted when new media releases containing selected key words are published.
Accurate Up-to-date Results
The Funnelback Enterprise Hosted Service has enabled AGIMO to provide visitors to the www.australia.gov.au site with an integrated search tool that is capable of returning accurate, up to date information about the Australian government.
Easy to Use Interface
Funnelback's easy to use administration interface allows AGIMO and other participating agencies to customise their search form look and feel and ensures compliance with departmental web publishing guidelines and AGLS and W3C standards.
Standards Compliance
Results from Funnelback Hosted can be provided as both HTML and XML. Funnelback is fully Dublin Core and AGLS compliant.
Reports for Analysis
The Funnelback data log reports provide valuable information about user behaviour and sentiment. This gives government the ability to make informed decisions about policy and program effectiveness.
Search Usage
Since its implementation in 2004, the number of queries processed by Funnelback on the www.australia.gov.au and from participating agencies has increased to over 500,000 queries per month or over 6 million queries per year.
Visit the Australian Government website to see Funnelback Search in action
