Comments on: Federated search: 10 unrealistic expectations

By: Federated search: ten unrealistic expectations & an idea « Infonatives

Federated search: ten unrealistic expectations & an idea « Infonatives — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 09:54:11 +0000

[...] search: ten unrealistic expectations & an idea This article on the most excellent Federated search blog outlines some of the unrealistic expectations that [...]

By: Lukas Koster

Lukas Koster — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 08:46:05 +0000

Another unrealistic expectation: a federated search in databases with different native languages will present all relevant records from those databases.

Another one: a search on author names will find all titles by these authors (not true because of differences in spelling, formats, name variations, languages, etc.)

One more: searching on specific subjects will result in the same records from different sources (not true because of differences in classification).

Solutions would be in maintaining virtual global authority files.

By: Bill Dueber

Bill Dueber — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 15:54:31 +0000

You write about speed: “This is not possible because the whole point of federated search is to search sources in real time. Searches need to be processed by remote search engines.”

This, I think, is a red herring. It’s not that we want to do “realtime” searching — it’s that vendors can’t or won’t release their indexes for inclusion in a larger, faster, single-index search. Most of the issues surrounding federated search would disappear if what we purchased was (a) a regular (weekly?) update to the index in a standard format and (b) access to the articles based on data supplied with the index.

But the process of searching four or five or eight different vendors (each with their own syntax, which changes over time), waiting for them all to return, then trying to do some sort of intelligent merge — well, it’s no wonder it’s ridiculously slow at times.