Established in 1989, the ARM Program is the Department of Energy’s largest global change research program. Eight national laboratories and numerous government agencies, universities, private companies, and foreign organizations contribute to its science and infrastructure using a complex network of web servers. While this distribution successfully focuses each server on a specific area of the website, it also creates a frustrating problem; the inability to search all the servers at the same time using a standard search tool. After identifying the need for a more robust search engine, ARM web development staff happily report that the www.arm.gov search engine is now being powered by the industry leader, GoogleTM. Google was chosen because it’s easy to use, indexes PDF files, and best of all, it can index multiple servers!
With the welcome addition of Google via google.arm.gov, users can now see query results from all the website servers, including the Data Archive and the External Data Center. In addition, specialized collections from the site are available from the drop down list to the right of the Google search field by changing from the “All Documents” selection. More collections will be added in the near future. This improvement, part of an ongoing site redesign, should greatly enhance usability of this expansive website.