Dec
I have three items to briefly cover today:
1. The judges have judged. I will be contacting the winners of the federated search writing contest in the next couple of days to congratulate them. The grand prize winner will be pleased to learn of an extra surprise. I’ll share that surprise with all of you soon.
2. Today I begin writing a primer on federated search. You might be surprised to learn that even though I’ve written many articles covering the basics, I’ve never answered the question of what federated search is. It turns out to be a difficult question to answer and I’ve been happy to ignore it up to now. The primer will appear as a guest article (or possibly a series of articles) on a to-be-named blog.
3. Janice De Wee from South Africa has discovered Rollyo and she shares her excitement about this tool in her blog, in a post titled “Thing 15 - Rollyo.” Janice writes:
WOW, what an excellent tool. I find ROLLYO easy and simple to use to create a federated search of free (open source) tools that we use to search for information but have to search each individual website. I am just concerned about the search functionality (limit functions) that is lost. I did not have enough time but would like to see whether one can also create a Rollyo for subscription databases, will test this at a later stage.
For those of you new to the tool, Rollyo is a web-based application, powered by the Yahoo! web index, that lets you perform a simultaneous search of multiple web-sites. I wrote about Rollyo when I discovered it last December. Dear Janice, please read my Rollyo post and save yourself some time. There is no Santa Claus and Rollyo can’t fill out search forms or handle subscription content. It’s not a federated search engine. I’m sorry.
As the year winds down I wish each of you a happy and healthy holiday season. I’ll keep the fire going on the blog if at only a dull roar.
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Tags: federated search
