I’m aware of how difficult it is for prospective customers to compare federated search offerings because a number of vendors don’t have publicly available demo applications. Even where the demos do exist, it’s hard to compare them because they’re not searching the same sources. I am making the effort to change that. I am inviting all federated search vendors, providers of Open Source federated search, and enterprise search vendors who have federated search to provide me with contact information and develop a demo application that is open to the public. I will create and host a vendor resource page with vendor information, logos, text boxes, and search buttons. The idea is that people can go to this web page, get information about a particular vendor, submit searches (one at a time) to the different demo applications and compare results, features, and look-and-feel characteristics of the different vendor offerings.

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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.