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.
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to the RSS feed!
Also, check out our writing contest with awesome prizes!
