I keep a list of ideas for articles. On that list I’ve got some items that are quite noteworthy but that I’m not planning to write entire articles about. Here are some of those items:

1. FantasyFootballNerd.com gets my nomination for most unusual use of federated search. Here’s what the press release announcing the site has to say:

FantasyFootballNerd.com today announced the consumer launch of FantasyFootballNerd.com, a comparison fantasy football website that helps users make informed decisions about draft and sit/start choices. It is the first meta-search engine for the estimated 18 million adults who participate in fantasy sports each year.

Read the rest of this entry »

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to the RSS feed!

Check out this post in the Library Juice blog to see one prediction of the future of federated search. I’d say Rory Litwin is off to a good start if he wants to enter our writing contest.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to the RSS feed!

[ Editor’s disclaimer: I am paid by both Deep Web Technologies and by the DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI) for various projects. ]

On Wednesday, Deep Web Technologies was named Small Business Innovation Research small business of the year by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). (There’s a press release regarding the award here.) In order to receive the prestigious award, Deep Web had to provide a song and slide show; a small snippet of the song plus the slide show was played at the ceremony.

Can you guess what song Deep Web chose?

Read the rest of this entry »

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to the RSS feed!

At the 1999 American Society for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T) Annual Meeting, Dr. Matthew Koll delivered a presentation titled “Major Trends and Issues in the Information Industry.” In a set of post-presentation notes, Dr. Koll made some powerful statements that, nearly 10 years later, still resonate with search in general, and with federated search in particular.

Koll defined information retrieval in a novel and elegant way:

Information retrieval is the science and practice of trying to show people the document they would want to see next, if they had total knowledge and hindsight.

Read the rest of this entry »

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to the RSS feed!

Have you ever been bored to tears during a vendor demo? Apparently Marcus recently was and he was proud enough of the fact to blog about what he was doing while the demo was happening. No, he wasn’t paying attention.

Marcus’ post got me to thinking - but not too hard, it being Friday - what makes a demo awful enough that I too would rather read “an article about dental caries published in Scientific Monthly in 1931.” So, here’s my list of top 10 demo killers:

Read the rest of this entry »

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to the RSS feed!

In, what industry analysts consider a bold move, Google has decided to stop crawling the web. Google management claims that the rapidly rising costs of purchasing and maintaining tens of thousands of index servers is what’s pushing it to rethink its approach to dominating Internet searching. Industry experts claim there are other pressing concerns driving Google to abandon its crawl and index approach.

Read the rest of this entry »

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to the RSS feed!