If you follow this blog you know that I rarely write about metasearch engines. It’s not that I dislike them, there’s just too many of them out there, it would be hard to keep track of them all, and few capture my attention. Plus, even though metasearch engines are federated search applications in their own right — they aggregate search results in real time from a number of sources (which may consist of live or crawled and indexed content) — I mentally place them in a category of their own.

Last December I wrote about Rollyo, a personal search engine that you can customize with a list of URLs to search. While one could argue that Rollyo is not a federated search application (it’s got to be searching crawled and indexed content rather than live sources if it searches arbitrary web-sites) I found it to be innovative enough to warrant a post. Addict-o-matic (hat tip to Web Worker Daily) is another metasearch engine that intrigued me.

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If you were to develop a federated search product for mobile phones, what characteristics would the product have?

I’ve been noticing quite a buzz on the web about the federated mobile search market so I’m curious to know how this niche is being served and how it could be better served. To be honest, I know very little about the intersection of mobile phones and federated search; I’ll be learning along with, or from, readers of this blog.

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New Idea Engineering has an in-depth article, “20+ Differences Between Internet vs. Enterprise Search - And Why You Should Care (Part 1)”, all about how the popular search engines find content and how enterprise search engines should do it differently. The article provides a rather lengthy analysis of a number of issues that those in the market for enterprise search would benefit from understanding. In a nutshell, a search appliance is not going to be very effective in any but the smallest enterprises. Of interest to readers of this blog is a discussion of areas of concern to potential customers of federated search.

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Hitachi distributed two press releases last week pertaining to new capabilities of their storage offerings; both releases discussed federated search as a strategic part of the offerings.

The giant storage and storage services vendor sees a competitive advantage in facilitating the search and retrieval of unstructured data that customers store on its devices. Hitachi has extended its digital archiving system, Content Archive Platform, to quickly search structured and unstructured data distributed throughout the enterprise. And, Hitachi has introduced new file and content services that simplify the management of data across network attached storage and content archives.

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A reader of this blog sent me an email with this question:

I’m looking for a public library that authenticates its remote users when they click on results, rather than before they do a search. Most sites I’ve found, both public and academic, authenticate before the user can do a search. … Do you know of any public library that follow this model?

The short answer is that I don’t know of any public library that follows this model and that I would be delighted if one of you can inform all of us by way of a comment. You’re not the first to ask this question and I’ve not heard a satisfactory answer. I do, however, have a few thoughts on the matter.

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