Dec
I remember well waking up early one morning, November 18, 2004 (no, I didn’t remember the exact date but Outlook did), to a flurry of emails from some of my East Coast customers.
They had seen a story in the New York Times announcing the birth of Google Scholar. A number of questions were raised – were federated search applications such as Science.gov going to become obsolete? Should we federate Google Scholar?
A few months later there was a brief article in Digital Librarian (this article is no longer available but here’s a summary) announcing that “2005 is the year that will be remembered (in the library world) as the year that federated search became obsolete.”
2007 is coming to a close, Google Scholar is still in Beta, and federated search is alive and doing well. In the last few years we’ve seen tremendous improvements in federated search and I expect that the years ahead will be an exciting time for Deep Web Technologies and others in our industry. I have high hopes that this blog can become “the place” where all kinds of information about federated search can be shared and openly discussed.
