The General Services Administration has launched the revamped search capabilities of the federal government's FirstGov portal.

Earlier this year, the GSA announced it had selected search technology provider Fast Search and Transfer (which also powers AllTheWeb) to search the portal's more than 51 million documents. FAST Search has the ability to search numerous file types, including: Excel and Word, in addition to the HTML and PDF documents that had been accessible since the site's launch. The GSA also claims that the Fast Search technology will allow users to search government databases from the FirstGov site. (This database search capability was not apparent during a recent visit to the FirstGov site.)

FAST also prides itself on its ability to crawl numerous sites at high speeds. This should help keep the FirstGov database up-to-date, as the numerous sites that are indexed by FirstGov add new materials and documents.

Previously, FirstGov had been powered by Inktomi search technology.