The Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, a research facility funded by the US Department of Energy and operated by Stanford University, has chosen Verity`s Ultraseek enterprise search engine to provide its user community with effective indexing, security and relevant results.
SLAC, as it is known among people living near its 430-acre site on Stanford`s Palo Alto, California campus and scientists around the world, chose Ultraseek over other search options, including hardware-based ones, when the centre saw the need to index content that resides on its secure servers to allow search from both its public and internal sites.
"SLAC operates the oldest Web site in North America. With the growing amount of content on our sites, we recognised the need for a better search engine to more properly serve site visitors and meet our business requirements," says Ruth McDunn, SLAC`s Web information manager.
"In addition, interest in high-energy physics and investigations into the structure of matter has grown among the general public, so there was a need to bridge the information on our intranet and with that on our external Web site to permit search across both without compromising the security of the content on our internal sites. Further, we needed a search engine that can index content quickly and easily across all content repositories.
"Use of SLAC facilities is open to qualified researchers from the US and around the world. About 3 000 such 'users` come to the laboratory each year from more than 20 nations to conduct research in groups ranging from a few scientists to hundreds of them. More than 300 are scientists actively involved in ongoing research. The results of all research performed at the laboratory are published openly in scientific and technical journals."
The principal focus of SLAC research is the field of particle physics. High-energy beams of subatomic particles collide with stationary targets or with each other; these collisions provide insights into the behaviour of matter and energy at extremely tiny distances or under very violent conditions that previously occurred only during the Big Bang birth of the universe. Stanford University and SLAC have pioneered the acceleration and use of electron beams for this research; the laboratory generates the highest-energy electron beams found anywhere in the world. There are 300 000 documents on the external SLAC site and 100 000 on its intranet. SLAC found the Verity Ultraseek search engine could integrate the content on the different sites, without requiring separate set-ups or equipment installations. Beyond that, initial user feedback indicates relevance of search results is high and security of restricted content is fully maintained.
"The work done at SLAC is extremely important as evidenced by the multiple Nobel Prizes in Physics that have been received based on SLAC efforts," says Garth Wittles, district manager for Verity in SA. "The physical sciences research community and the general population alike will be able to benefit from easier, more secure and accurate search performance of the combined SLAC sites using the newest version of Verity Ultraseek."
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