Enterprise Search Platform

The University at Buffalo intends to procure a comprehensive search platform pursuant to its discretionary purchasing authority under State Finance Law §163(6) and NYS Education Law §355 (5)(a). This procurement opportunity is limited to New York State businesses certified pursuant to Article 15-A or Article 17-B of the New York State Executive Law.

The University at Buffalo (“University”) is seeking the below services:

To renew its search and insight platform to ensure continuity, scalability, and enhanced discovery across its campus web properties.

The platform must fully support the following capabilities:

• Enterprise Search: Indexes and retrieves content from multiple sources including CMS (UBCMS), Oracle databases, and file systems.
• Relevance Tuning: Allows administrators to adjust ranking algorithms and boost specific content to improve result quality and visibility.
• Faceted Navigation: Supports dynamic filtering by metadata such as content type, department, or date, as seen in UB’s current tabbed search interface.
• Customizable UI: Enables branding and layout customization to match UB’s institutional web standards, including support for FTL templates and custom mini-sites like “Find My UBIT Name” and “People Search.”
• Search Analytics: Provides reports on search behavior, popular queries, and zero-result searches to inform content strategy and improve user experience.
• Content Auditing: Identifies broken links, outdated content, and accessibility issues across indexed pages using built-in auditing tools such as Accessibility Auditor and Content Auditor.
• Integration with Adobe CMS: Seamless indexing and retrieval of content hosted in UBCMS, UB’s content management system, with support for custom search endpoints.
• Personalization: Supports tailored search results based on user roles or behavior, including curated promotions and “best bets” managed by business users.
• RESTful API: Enables programmatic access to search results and indexing functions, including support for /s/search.json and autocomplete APIs used across UB domains.
• Security & Access Control: Honors content permissions and supports role-based access to search results, ensuring secure and appropriate content delivery.
• Scalability: Capable of supporting large-scale deployments across multiple campus domains, with daily indexing of over 350,000 documents and capacity for up to 500,000.
• Support for Structured & Unstructured Data: Indexes HTML, PDFs, Word documents, and other formats, including database-driven collections with Oracle connectors.
• Custom Server-Side Logic: Preserves existing Groovy-based query hooks and index filters, with migration or reimplementation in DXP as needed.
• Crawl Scheduling: Enables flexible crawl scheduling, including daily reindexing, high-frequency updates for directories and news, and reduced frequency for archived content.
• Knowledge Transfer: Includes comprehensive documentation and training options for UB developers and administrators to ensure successful adoption and long-term sustainability.

Interested parties should contact Alex Borichevskiy for more details about this opportunity.

Business enterprises awarded an identical or substantially similar procurement contract within the past five years:

- Squiz, Inc.

**SDVOB Goal:** 6.00%

**MBE Goal:** 17.90%

**WBE Goal:** 12.10%