Funnelback to power searching on Aussie Government web sites

Stuart Corner
Friday, 11 November 2011 13:32

IT Industry - Deals

The Australian Government Information Management Office (AGIMO) has awarded a three year contract worth almost $4m to CSIRO spin-off company Funnelback for technology that will enable the public to search for information across Government web sites.

In a posting on its blog site, AGIMO said: "The contract for the provision of government search services'¦[allowing] people to locate information on public-facing government websites using keywords and other refinements to a search pattern.

The Service is administered by the Department of Finance and Deregulation (AGIMO) and can be used by any Australian Government agency.

According to AGIMO, Funnelback will provide a managed service and will be responsible for the procurement, development and operation of the service; Finance and the user agencies will only be responsible for making the functionality of the service available to users.

AGIMO said: "The Service is broadly composed of the following functions: harvesting and indexing; web search; subscriptions to search results (email/RSS updates); administration and maintenance."

Funnelback was formed in 2006 to commercialise the CSIRO-developed P@NOPTIC search technology. The CSIRO sold the company to Australian based Squiz - the developer of open source content management systems - in mid 2009.

Funnelback counts among its customer a wide range of high profile government and corporate clients including the UK Electoral Commission, the National Research Council of Canada, New Zealand Automobile Association, the Australian and Queensland Governments, Westpac Bank and Australian Broadcasting Corporation.