The best of Federated Search Blog

This blog started last December 3rd with a welcome post. The blog will soon be four months old. I thought it would be fun to see what posts have been the most popular, in terms of views, so I looked at the WordPress stats for the blog. Here’s what I found:

These were the 10 most read posts, in decreasing order of popularity:

• Federated Search: The year in review
• One-stop access to multiple federated search applications
• Proxy servers and federated search
• What determines quality of search results?
• OpenTranslators announcement raises questions
• Consolidation in federated search: ProQuest acquires WebFeat
• Is federated search as bad as librarians think?
• Not all Federated Search Engines are Created Equal
• Content access basics - Part I - screen scraping
• Response to OpenTranslators post

So, what do these stats tell me? I notice that the articles about the basics of federated search are not the most popular ones. Either most blog readers are beyond the basics or else the basics articles are not easy to find. Abe’s year in review post is the most popular. That makes sense since Abe knows the industry very well and I would expect people to want to know what he sees. So, I’ll need to get Abe to write more about the industry in his “spare time.” I’m not surprised that the next most popular article is One-stop access to federated search applications since I’ve referenced this post several times from other posts and other blogs have linked to the post as well. It was interesting to me that Proxy servers and federated search and What determines quality of search results? were the next most popular posts. I see these two articles as a bit beyond basic but maybe that is what readers are hungry for.

So, which posts do I think are the best ones on this blog? Here are some of my favorites, in no particular order:

• Proxy servers and federated search
• What determines quality of federated search results?
• What is clustering?
• Consolidation in federated search: ProQuest acquires WebFeat
• Is federated search as bad as librarians think?
• One-stop access to multiple federated search applications
• OpenTranslators announcement raises questions
• Undergraduates and federated search at Brigham Young

Realizing that it is difficult to find articles on this blog, I’ve created an Articles page that you can get to by clicking the Articles tab beneath the search box or by clicking on this link.

I’m planning to write some more basics and beyond-the-basics articles in the coming weeks. Topics will include authentication, planning for a federated search pilot, the role of metadata in federated search, URL resolvers, and others. Are these the kinds of articles you want to see? I’m open to suggestions.

Leave a comment and let us all know which posts you enjoyed most. I’ll keep an eye on the WordPress stats to see what is popular next quarter and I’ll report back and tell you what I’ve learned.

Tags: federated search