In a recent article, Infotech reported that Oxford, Cambridge, and Stanford have each announced federated search systems.

The press releases provide some insight into what was important to each of them:

• Ex Libris issued a press release, on May 5, announcing that Oxford had chosen its Metalib product.
• WebFeat (now part of Serials Solutions) announced, on April 30, that Cambridge had chosen WebFeat Express.
• Stanford ’s March 27 press release announced a partnership with Deep Web Technologies (this blog’s sponsor).

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At the 1999 American Society for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T) Annual Meeting, Dr. Matthew Koll delivered a presentation titled “Major Trends and Issues in the Information Industry.” In a set of post-presentation notes, Dr. Koll made some powerful statements that, nearly 10 years later, still resonate with search in general, and with federated search in particular.

Koll defined information retrieval in a novel and elegant way:

Information retrieval is the science and practice of trying to show people the document they would want to see next, if they had total knowledge and hindsight.

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[ Editor’s note: Carl Grant, President of CARE Affiliates, was one of the volunteers who took me up on my offer to review several chapters of Christopher Cox’s book about federated search. Following is his review of one of the chapters: “Developing the Right RFP for Selecting Your Federated Search Product: Lessons Learned and Tips from Recent Experience” by Jerry Caswell and John Wynstra.

I appreciate that this review comes from a seasoned federated search vendor; Carl Grant has been in the library automation industry for a long time and raises an important concern about the RFP process, how his experience is that the current RFP model doesn’t really serve the customer or vendor, and he touches on what he sees as a better approach.

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Last week, federated search vendor MuseGlobal announced that it had partnered with consulting firm Adhere Solutions to provide federated search for the Google Search Appliance. Dubbed the “All Access Connector,” MuseGlobal and Adhere have developed an extension to Google’s Search Appliance. The press release announcing the partnership lists a number of features:

• Access to hundreds of millions of pages of content from over 5,400 sources, all through the Google interface.
• Simple one-click entry to external sources with no additional log-in requirements through a powerful proxy server.
• Non-stop and instantaneous, 24-hour content retrieval through automatic updates to connectors as changes take place to target sources.
• A much lower cost than the manual acquisition and indexing of all desired sources.
• Compliance with current authentication and security policies with a role-based search access model.
• Pre-built and constantly monitored connectors that require no coding to implement.
• Easy navigation of search results by source, subject, date and other meta-data categories.

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I’ve had discussions recently with Abe Lederman and Darcy Pedersen regarding how organizations go about selecting a federated search vendor. (Darcy runs marketing for Deep Web Technologies, this blog’s sponsor, and Abe is my brother and runs the company.) I wanted to know how Deep Web’s customers went about choosing a vendor, whether it be Deep Web or one of its competitors. What questions did prospective customers ask? What were their concerns? How did they formulate requirements? How did they conduct pilots? How did they ultimately evaluate vendors?

To synthesize our discussions, Darcy drafted a checklist of questions. I’m not ready to post the list yet because I’m interested in fleshing it out a bit more and I want other input to improve and extend the questions, hence this post.

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If you follow this blog you know that I rarely write about metasearch engines. It’s not that I dislike them, there’s just too many of them out there, it would be hard to keep track of them all, and few capture my attention. Plus, even though metasearch engines are federated search applications in their own right — they aggregate search results in real time from a number of sources (which may consist of live or crawled and indexed content) — I mentally place them in a category of their own.

Last December I wrote about Rollyo, a personal search engine that you can customize with a list of URLs to search. While one could argue that Rollyo is not a federated search application (it’s got to be searching crawled and indexed content rather than live sources if it searches arbitrary web-sites) I found it to be innovative enough to warrant a post. Addict-o-matic (hat tip to Web Worker Daily) is another metasearch engine that intrigued me.

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Search industry pundit, Stephen Arnold, writes about enterprise search train wrecks in his Beyond Search blog. Arnold sees many enterprise search installations, not as train wrecks that are waiting to happen, but as those that have already happened. Federated search vendors and customers should read Arnold’s article carefully. The article leads with this bold statement:

Enterprise search may be a train wreck for more than half of the people who use today’s most popular systems. The Big Name vendors can grouse, stomp, and sneer at this assertion. Reality: Most of these systems disappoint their licensees. When a search system “goes off the rails”, the consequences can be unexpected.

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The slides are up from the Infonortics Search Engine Meeting that was just held in Boston (4/28-4/29). Here are a number of presentations that caught my eye. Not all are related to federated search but breakthroughs in search should be of interest to all of us.

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Have you ever been bored to tears during a vendor demo? Apparently Marcus recently was and he was proud enough of the fact to blog about what he was doing while the demo was happening. No, he wasn’t paying attention.

Marcus’ post got me to thinking - but not too hard, it being Friday - what makes a demo awful enough that I too would rather read “an article about dental caries published in Scientific Monthly in 1931.” So, here’s my list of top 10 demo killers:

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2collab is a social bookmarking site that was introduced late last year. If it were just another bookmarking site it wouldn’t be all that interesting. Peter Scott’s Library Blog has a succinct description of 2collab that should make readers of this blog curious:

2collab is a social bookmarking site where you can store and organize your favorite internet resources - such as blogs, websites, research articles, and more. Then, in private or public groups you can decide to share your bookmarks with others - stimulating debate and discussion. Members of groups can evaluate these resources (by rating bookmarks, tagging and adding comments), or add their own bookmarks. You can browse public groups and bookmarks, but must register (your name and email address) to access the full functionality – such as creating groups, adding comments, and adding bookmarks.” 2collab is a free service from Elsevier, initiated by a collaboration between Scopus and ScienceDirect.

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