The Federal Maritime Commission (FMC) Servcon site serves as a central collection point for all national and international shipping contracts. Shippers are required to file a copy of all contracts when dealing with the United States.

The Servcon site presented several unique challenges. The FMC had a repository of over 600,000 contracts in various formats. The previous system only allowed for searching of content within these contracts. In addition to the contracts however, there was also a Microsoft Access database contain extra information on each uploaded contract. Information such as the filers name, organization and exact time of upload.

The challenge was to allow for the FMC to search both the contracts and the database content at the same time. Our solution was the Alta Vista Search (AVS) engine. We developed a customer implementation of the AVS that allowed for advanced searches based on the text content of the documents and all fields of the database at the same time. The result was an prevented new level of flexibility in data retrieval for the FMC. Another benefit of the AVS system was a jump in searchable file types. The previous system could handle only 30 file types. The new system seamlessly processes and searches over 150 file types.

Currently the site has over 800,000 contracts and we expect it to reach over a million by the end of the year. The site processes more than 2 Gigabytes in uploads each month.