NASA Langley is using enterprise search to empower it's highly-technical workforce, said a NASA official Nov. 16 at KMWorld, a knowledge management conference in Washington, D.C. The project began when Manjula Ambur, information management branch chief within the office of the chief information officer at NASA Langley Research Center, learned that the vast majority of NASA scientists and engineers used a Google search when seeking technical information. The problem: Many periodicals, reports and internal NASA documents are not searchable by the public Google search engine.

Now, NASA Langley is leveraging an enterprise search tool built on Google Search Appliance, but deployment is really never done. Ambur is constantly listening to users and enlisting support from the IT department--as evidenced by the feedback box that appears under every returned search. Asking users about the quality of search results allows her to tweak and update the application to get NASA employees the information they need. Article