FAST at FirstGov

FirstGov is now using a new search engine from FAST, replacing the original Inktomi search engine. This is not the regular FAST database used at AllTheWeb and Lycos, but it does use the same technology. The new FirstGov search engine includes non-HTML file types such as PDFs, Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and .txt and perhaps more. Even the advanced search form has no file type limit at this time, but since this is based on FAST technology, the 'url.all' field search can help. For example, putting url.all:pdf after the search terms will narrow the results to PDF files and other pages with 'pdf' somewhere else in the URL.