Case Study: GSA Auctions achieves faster, more flexible search with Thunderstone Search Appliances

Thunderstone Search Appliances for Searching a Government Surplus-Property Auction Website

GSA Auctions, the U.S. General Services Administration’s online surplus-property auction site, needed a better way to search large amounts of structured and unstructured inventory data. Its existing mainframe-based full-text search was basic, resource-intensive, and required parsing the complete database for each request, so GSA looked for a more affordable, feature-rich alternative.

Thunderstone provided off-the-shelf Thunderstone Search Appliances to power GSA Auctions’ search, with customization for up to 50 additional data fields and support for multiple search modes, including global, category, state, and advanced search. The solution reduced load on the ClearPath mainframe, cut development costs by hundreds of thousands of dollars, and delivered Google-like search features with strong reliability and minimal administration.

GSA Auctions

Kevin J. Payne

Director of System Applications