I used to live in Herndon, Virginia and my condo associated negotiated a 10 year $50k deal to have a really bad midwestern ISP run the complex. The money the HOA got was used legally in that they lowered our condo fees. The members did not get to vote on it and it was a board decision only. Believe me, it was a crappy deal in that 50 down / 40 up was the standard for a long time until that ISP was bought by Cox. Even then, we had to have Cox until the deal ran out. I just do not know how these are legal.

There are a lot of products out there to let you search the internet but not so many that allow you to search the intranet. The DoS needed to search 1 million documents, provide a frontend easily, and secure it with SAML. The Google Appliance does all this and for a fraction of the price that everyone else offers. We used to use Convera but the product ran in java and required a huge number of resources. It did not provide a great frontend to do translations and I lost sleep at night trying to keep the software running 24/7. With google I am sleeping normal hours and my biggest problem is with the editors and the content. They also just released a sharepoint connector to crawl and index a sharepoint server and its content. Overall, the goal of the government should be to search the million if not billions and billions of documents, provide value, and make it secure. Also, I think every man, woman, and child has used Google so it is an easy interface and no learning curve.