The federal government will soon lure citizens to its Web pages with a revamped official government Web portal that looks and feels a lot like popular search sites.

FirstGov users will get search results clustered into groups of related hits through new technologies that the General Services Administration is buying.

Vivisimo, which operates the Clusty.com search engine, and Microsoft MSN Search will power the government portal under a $1.8 million contract announced late last month. Vivisimo and Microsoft will offer FirstGov users more organized and comprehensive results from media outlets, image libraries and government Web pages, officials said.

The move indicates a shift in government acquisition practices toward mirroring industry trends rather than playing catch-up. FirstGov had been using search supplier Fast Search and Transfer since 2002. When government officials decided they wanted FirstGov to adopt more advanced, user-friendly search capabilities, they awarded a new contract in less than three months.

"Since we first awarded that [Fast Search] contract in 2002, search has changed a lot," said M.J. Pizzella, associate administrator of GSA's Office of Citizen Services and Communications, which oversees FirstGov. "We try to stay on the cutting edge as best we can, considering the restraints on government with budgets."

The contract is part of an $18 million, five-year blanket purchase agreement that FirstGov set up to acquire future search capabilities. The BPA enables officials to award a new contract every year to a host of vendors, including Vivisimo, Fast Search and Gigablast. Well-known search companies Google and Yahoo did not bid, government officials said.

"Next year, when the renewal date comes up, we could have the option to look at any other company that is under the BPA," Pizzella said. "This technology is moving so fast that if you lock yourself in, you can't move as fast as technology."

Pizzella said the government "is often woefully behind technology. Hopefully, this will allow the government to move in real time with the pace of technology."

The new search engine will be three times as large and half as costly as FirstGov's current search capabilities. Now, FirstGov indexes about 8 million federal government Web pages. Vivisimo and MSN will comb through about 24 million pages from federal, state, local, tribal and territorial government Internet sources. For the first time, FirstGov will retrieve images and news articles from the mainstream press. In the same search, the engine will also scour government images and official agency news releases.