The London Borough of Brent is a keen proponent of internet technology - its web site offers 12,000 pages organised around 450 different council services, handling traffic of around one million page views and 100,000 unique visitors per month.

Earlier this year, the council installed two Google Search Appliances (GSAs) to help improve the results of searches input by residents looking to access Brent content online. It had previously been using open-source search packages for the same purpose, then adapted Google's public search facility for use on its own web site to prefix all searches with "Brent Council " to improve accuracy and response, and also used Google's mini search boxes for the same purpose.

The deployment of one GSA for public internet use and another on the council's intranet for its own employees was a significant investment. The GSA is a dedicated rack server with pre-loaded software that searches content across corporate portals, web sites, file servers, content management systems and specific business applications, storing an index of the data it finds to improve searches and provide analytic functions.

“We had some discussions about why we needed to switch, and one of the major factors was that we did not have complete control over the type or quantity of ads that appear,” said Dane Wright, senior strategy manager at the council.

“That is particularly important for us because we have some services that compete with third-party offerings, such as building control and registry offices, and these departments would be unhappy if rival services appeared next to the Brent web site.”

While the public-facing GSA provides access to "virtually everything", there are a few areas of the public site that are restricted and IT staff can also erase search results if they need to. Wright said configuring specific rules is simple enough to do, while a combination of manual input and automation based on metadata helps the council prioritise the pages that people see.

"In some cases, we might want people to see a particularly important page always shown at the top of a search. For a term such as 'town hall', for example, directions on how to get to it, and after that allow the Google page ranking system to come in," said Wright.

“We can also promote certain pages and push others down the list, like parking at Wembley Stadium, instructions on how to get a parking permit or a list of events, rather than a PDF about parking problems.”

Brent reports that the accuracy of the information now being searched has been greatly improved, in part due to the use of contextual data that helps visitors find what they want more quickly according to the other local government resources already browsed. IT staff can also look at the statistics from Google analytics and refine what people are searching on to see if it can improve the access for content that people are searching for but are not finding easy to retrieve.

The GSAs also enables searches on Brent's site to include results from third-party web sites, such as those used to host job applications, something not possible with previous search engines used by the council.

Wright did not disclose how much Brent spent on the two GSAs. List prices for the appliances vary enormously according to the server hardware specification and the number of documents to be indexed, with prices starting at around $30,000 (£18,000 excluding VAT) a piece. Dell, for example, offers the GSA GB-7007 able to index 500,000 documents for around $42,600 (£26,000 excluding VAT).

“Defining return on investment is tricky because we do not know what situation we would be in if we did not have them. But we get a good level of public search anyway, and there are other ancillary benefits – things like being able to suppress ads,” said Wright.