The Children's Oncology Group (COG) is a National Cancer Institute-supported clinical trials cooperative group devoted exclusively to childhood and adolescent cancer research. COG develops and coordinates cancer clinical trials conducted at the 238 member institutions, which include cancer centers of all major universities and teaching hospitals throughout the U.S. and Canada, as well as sites in Europe and Australia. COG members include over 5000 cancer researchers dedicated to saving the lives of children with cancer.

As part of this effort, COG maintains a web site for member institutions. "Our site was growing rapidly and we didn't have a search engine in place. Our site is 80% database-driven. The rest is hard content in the form of HTML, Microsoft Word and PDF documents," said Marcelo Alvarez, Web Team Lead Children's Oncology Group.

"We needed a strong flexible search tool that could meet the demands of our environment; handle the database-driven portion plus the hard content. Not too many search engines offer that capability. And only a handful of those do so reliably. After doing a lot of research on search engines, we decided on dtSearch."

"We could not be happier with the results. Using the Spider and Web components, we are able to index our content, search PDF, HTML, Word and ASP documents, and even provide search capability for the CD-ROM containing the proceedings of our annual member conferences. When it comes to a search engine, we could not have asked for anything more. As we move forward with our technology initiatives, we will be implementing more dtSearch functionality."

For more information on COG, please visit www.childrensoncologygroup.org