This week the Science.gov Alliance released Science.gov 5.0. The release got a good amount of press from a couple of press releases (from the US Department of Energy and Deep Web Technologies) and from a number of bloggers, including Valerie Allen (Product Manager for Science.gov) on OSTI’s own blog and the SLA Government Information Division blog. When I worked for Deep Web, I supported the application and have enjoyed watching it evolve and grow.

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What are the difficult challenges that federated search vendors are facing? How are they meeting these challenges? Miriam Drake, Professor Emerita at the Georgia Institute of Technology, and one of the judges of the federated search writing contest, asks a number of industry leaders some difficult questions. Drake’s article appears in the July/August edition of Searcher Magazine. The article is not freely available; only this short description appears on the publisher’s site for the current edition:

Miriam Drake talked to a number of federated search developers to get their perspective on issues such as scalability, common names, and reliability and how these areas affect federated search technology and user satisfaction.

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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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The first thing that most people notice when they use a federated search application is that it’s not nearly as fast as Google. We’ve all gotten spoiled. This is not only the information age, it’s the age of quick information; we all want every search to be as fast as a Google search. However, by its very nature, federated search can’t be as fast as Google. Federated search is at the mercy of the sources it federates. If a source is slow to return results to the federated search application, then there’s nothing the federated search application can do, or is there?

Deep Web Technologies has been displaying incremental results for some time now. The idea is simple: display results in chunks as they are received from the sources being searched. Science.gov, WorldWideScience.org, and Scitopia.org are three applications that display incremental results. While there are challenges to this approach, there are some significant benefits as well. The aim of displaying incremental results is to minimize the time the user has to wait to see some results. In the show-something-quick department, incremental results works well. The major challenge arises when you try to figure out what to do with the rest of the results as they come in.

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Abe discovered “Searching the Deep Web” on YouTube yesterday. This is a nice professionally produced 6-minute introduction to the Deep Web made by the US Department of Energy Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI). Deep Web Technologies is mentioned in the video as DWT has created the search technology for a number of major OSTI applications.

What’s very cool about this video hitting You Tube is that Abe and I think of You Tube as hosting very mainstream videos. We like the idea of the public being exposed to federated search in such a venue.

For your viewing pleasure, here’s the video. Make yourself some popcorn, relax, and enjoy the show!

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In June of this year, Barclay Hill of Intel delivered a presentation to the Special Libraries Association (SLA) at its Annual Conference about Intel’s experience bringing federated search to their corporate library. Hill is manager of the Web and Systems Group at the Intel Library at Intel Corporation. Associated with the presentation is an article, “Federated Search at the Intel Library.” A revised version of the article was published in the September 2007 edition of Information Outlook, SLA’s monthly magazine. SLA has given permission for Deep Web Technologies, whose federated search technology was selected by Intel and who is referenced in the article, to post the article on Deep Web Tech’s web-site. Please follow this link to the article.

Hill’s article is a case study in bringing federated search to Intel from requirements through implementation. The article should be of interest to anyone exploring a federated search solution for a corporate environment as this topic is not widely covered in the literature, especially discussion of a large-scale deployment within a multinational corporation. We welcome hearing of your experiences with federated search in the corporation, or elsewhere, through comments in this blog, through guest posts, and through references to relevant articles.

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