This is the second installment of my interview with Michael Bergman. The first part is here. Today, Michael tells about the early days at BrightPlanet and about his pioneering work with the deep Web. Plus, he tells us the origin of the term “deep Web.”
Michael is the third person I honor in this luminary series. You can read prior interviews with luminaries Kate Noerr and Todd Miller in the blog archives.
LinkedIn recently added a news feature to their groups. If you are a member of a group you can submit, discuss, or recommend news articles that group members might be interested in.
I’ve started submitting articles I think are worthwhile to the group. I’ve posted six so far.
The LinkedIn Federated Search group has 83 members. Come join us, read or submit news items, or share in discussions.
Here’s the link to join the group: http://www.linkedin.com/e/gis/156331.
You need to be a member of LinkedIn to join the group but LinkedIn membership is free.
To those of you still working on your essays for the “predict the future of federated search” writing contest, you have just three days to get your submissions in.
Read all about the contest and the career-boosting prizes here.
I have acknowledged every submission I’ve received so, if you submitted an entry and didn’t hear back from me please contact me again. I do regularly check my spam folder to make sure none of your submissions get lost.
[ Editor's note: Is metasearch a bad idea? If, after reading this article by Carl Grant, you still think it is, send me your rebuttal. If it's well written - whether or not I agree with it - I'll publish it.
Carl Grant is President of Ex Libris North America. With more than a quarter century of experience in the library-automation industry, I'm grateful for his periodic articles in this blog. ]
“We don’t really need metasearch…” is a phrase I’ve heard several times lately and I have to admit it that has the same effect on me as fingernails being dragged across a blackboard. That’s because this position implies:
I’m excited to be publishing this interview with federated search luminary Michael Bergman. You can read my preview of this interview here. In this first installment Michael shares his early background.
Michael is the third person I honor in this luminary series. You can read prior interviews with luminaries Kate Noerr and Todd Miller in the blog archives.
I’ve been reading The Invisible Web by Chris Sherman and Gary Price to learn about the history of the deep web and federated search. The book was published in 2001. I’ll review it another time; today I want to challenge you with some trivia questions inspired by content from the book.
See how many questions you can answer. Leave your answers in the comments. No prizes, no glory, no fame, just fun. If you don’t want to spoil your fun, don’t look at the comments until you answer as many questions as you can.
I’m about to add a little bit of AJAX to some software I’m writing so I’m reading up on the technology. So, when my Google alert for “federated search” turned up 5 things you didn’t know about AJAX I was curious to read the article, which appeared in the blog for the Task Force on Social Networking Software for the Medical Library Association. Read my previous article, The interplay between AJAX and federated search, for background material on the intersection of the two subjects. That article introduces AJAX:
AJAX stands for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML. Asynchronous refers to the fact that a program using AJAX can request an update to bits of a web page without having to reload the entire web page. JavaScript provides the mechanism that the web page uses to communicate with the HTTP (web) server. XML is the standard that is sometimes, but certainly not always, used to encode the data given to the web server. AJAX is basically a set of standards and techniques that a web programmer can use to create HTML-based web applications that are browser-independent where parts of the page refresh smoothly without requiring entire page reloads.
Michael Bergman is federated search luminary number three. Like Kate Noerr and Todd Miller, Mr. Bergman has made major contributions to federated search. You may want to read my recent article, On the history of the deep web, to gain an appreciation of the depth of his experience.
I interviewed Michael about a number of areas in which he’s done important work:
This post is a bit of a rant, and somewhat off topic. So, if you were expecting hard-hitting federated search news today, you may want to browse elsewhere. But, please please please, do come back.
Today’s subject is FeedBurner. That’s the free service that most blogs use to track the number of subscribers they have. Yes, FeedBurner is owned by Google so I am ranting about both Google and Feedburner in a single post. My beef? FeedBurner’s inability to count in a sober fashion.
I’ve been getting interested in the history of the deep web. I think it’s important to know our roots as a federated search community and those roots are in the early exploration of the deep web. Plus, without the deep web I don’t think there would be much of a federated search industry, although some may argue otherwise. (See my article, Federated search and the deep web, for further discussion of the relationship between the two concepts.)
This blog’s federated search luminary series helps to document history; it aims to acknowledge those individuals who contributed to shaping the industry including including those who have influenced how we mine deep web content today. The series currently honors two luminaries; read on to learn about who the third luminary will be.
