I’m excited to be publishing this interview series with federated search luminary Erik Selberg. Erik’s contributions to federated search go back to 1994. You can read my preview of this series with Erik (and the list of questions) here. The majority of my questions to Erik involve his development of MetaCrawler, one of the earliest metasearch engines.

Erik Selberg joins the ranks of federated search luminaries, standing together with Kate Noerr, Todd Miller, and Michael Bergman.

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In 1994, Erik Selberg created MetaCrawler, one of the earliest metasearch engines. Erik’s MetaCrawler was truly revolutionary in doing something we all take for granted today: querying and aggregating results from a number of search engines. Today, the work that Erik pioneered lives on in modern metasearch and federated search engines. For his vision and for his important contributions to and influence of today’s federated search technology, I honor Erik Selberg as the fourth luminary, standing together with Kate Noerr, Todd Miller, and Michael Bergman.

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The wildly popular ReadWriteWeb blog, with 257,000 RSS subscribers, will be interviewing Deep Web Technologies‘ founder Abe Lederman together with four other panelists about how the Web is changing health care. The interview will be conducted at 3:30pm PST (6:30EST) today for this week’s episode of RRW Live which you can listen to live.

ReadWriteWeb has this to say about Abe:

… President and CEO of Deep Web Technologies. He has helped design several major search engines in health notably science.gov and worldwidescience.org and the new search engine Mednar.

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The Arizona Health Sciences Library (AHSL) developed their own federated search application. The Journal of the Medical Library Association (JMLA) published a paper about the development of the application.

The paper’s abstract briefly describes the project:

The AHSL provides services to the University of Arizona’s (UA’s) health sciences programs and to the University Medical Center. Librarians at AHSL collaborated with UA College of Medicine faculty to create an innovative search engine, Evidence-based Medicine (EBM) Search, that provides users with a simple search interface to EBM resources and presents results organized according to an evidence pyramid. EBM Search was developed with a web-based configuration component that allows the tool to be customized for different specialties.

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WorldWideScience.org, the global science gateway, has gotten a lot of press recently. Last month, China joined the WorldWideScience Alliance, the organization that is primarily sponsored by ICSTI, and that manages the gateway, and China contributed access to some of their science content to the application. This was a huge deal. Brian Hitson, OSTI’s Associate Director for Administration & Information Services, and I co-authored an article on OSTI’s blog explaining just why this was significant. (Note: OSTI is the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Scientific and Technical Information. ICSTI is the International Council for Scientific and Technical Information.) Adding to the attention was this blog article by Hope Leman in AltSearchEngines which opened my eyes further as to why the global expansion of WorldWideScience.org is a really big deal.

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Abe has been giving me a hard time for wanting to review The Invisible Web. Chris Sherman and Gary Price wrote the book in 2001. That’s seven years ago. That’s a lifetime or three in Internet years. The book’s an antique. Its information is out of date. Why waste my time with it?

I’m moving forward with my review because I believe that the history of federated search and of the deep web is important to study for the same reasons that we study our country’s history in school. We hopefully learn from the past and gain an appreciation and a perspective for how far we’ve come over a period of time. And, the invisible web is the deep web and the deep web is the reason for the existence of the federated search industry.

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This is the final installment of my interview with Michael Bergman. The interview started here. Today Michael talks about federated search, the semantic Web, and his work with Zitgist.

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.

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Paula J. Hane, Information Today, Inc.’s news bureau chief and editor of NewsBreaks, today published a favorable review of Deep Web Technologies’ business portal Biznar. For the sake of full disclosure, Deep Web Technologies sponsors this blog.

Deep Web is creating a number of vertical search portals to assist researchers in specific markets. The portals are free to use and they provide an alert capability that will send users an email when their saved queries identify new documents. Mednar, a medical research portal, is a second Deep Web portal in beta.

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Although I do much less programming than I once did, I can still relate to the thrill of writing code to solve a fun and challenging problem. Matt, a software developer and graduate student in computer science, is tackling a very difficult problem; he’s going to write software to “crawl” content that lives behind search forms. And, he’s blogging about it. The first installment of his journey is in his Try-Catch-FAIL blog.

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What are the market forces that are driving vendors in the search industry (not just federated search?) John Harney explored this question in a November 3rd KMWorld article, The evolving federation of search. Here’s a piece of Harney’s answer:

The short answer is the phenomenal proliferation of information across the global enterprise; the disparate locations of that data—common applications like SharePoint, IBM Lotus Notes, SAP, as well as apps unique to the organization like shared and network drives; and the types of data—structured and unstructured. But that said, what’s key to the new techniques is that their applications and vertical markets are also almost limitless and don’t require the user to change legacy applications and formats to get at legacy information. Adapters to different apps solve that problem.

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