Australian Unity’s Direct Approach

February 7, 2007: The Special Minister of State, Gary Nairn, has announced that Funnelback Pty Ltd has secured a further two year contract to provide search engine services on the Australia.gov.au website, the online entry point for the Australian Government.

The website allows users to find government information and services via the 2000 links to information and services from over 750 Australian Government websites. The Australian Government search service is the responsibility of the Australian Government Information Management Office (AGIMO).

Funnelback, which used to be called Panoptic, was born out of technology jointly developed by the CSIRO and the Australian National University. It came to life in 1993 and has been operating as a wholly-owned subsidiary of the CSIRO since until it became independent about 14 months ago.

For the past two years Funnelback has been providing search under a fully hosted ASP (application service provider) model for whole of government website.

The old system was suffering from unreasonable downtime and causing frustration for users due to irrelevant results being returned.

The old system was suffering from unreasonable downtime and causing frustration for users due to irrelevant results being returned.

Stuart Biele, Funnelback’s general manager says, “Every weekend we do a full call of everything in gov.au and we provide a searchable index of 2.3 million documents and html pages. Overnight we do a refresh call to pick up the top 200 documents. What that means is that content is fresh and searchable. Some vendors only do this once per month, so this system keeps everything fresh every day.”

The key issue according to Biele is the relevance of search ranking. “A lot of search engines bring back results which are not,” says Biele who puts Funnelback’s success down to their “algorithm advantage” and support. “Believe it or not, keeping the customer happy is one of the most important sales tools.”

Mr Nairn says, “By providing the entry point to government, australia.gov.au is making it easier for citizens to get access to the broad range of government information and services.

“As part of this arrangement, the Department of Finance and Administration has made the australia.gov.au search engine service available to other Australian Government agencies for their websites.”

This service has already been taken up by 20 agencies, with more expected to join over the coming months.

Nairn says, “The public will benefit because the australia.gov.au search engine service, combined with the many other products and services of the Australian Government Information Management Office, is helping Australians find government information and services more easily.”

Other clients using Funnelback’s search technology include the Australian Stock Exchange, Westpac and NineMSN. Biele clarifies here though that NineMSN only uses Funnelback for searches internal to its website such as Cleo and Cosmopolitan.