The Lone Wolf Librarian posted an article earlier this month challenging recently-turned-ten Google on its claim that search was 90% solved. That article got my attention. It is an excellent read all by itself but what really caught my eye was the reference to an LA Times blog interview with Marissa Mayer, Google’s vice president of search products and user experience. When asked what the next ten years holds for Google, Ms. Mayer makes this statement:

I think there will be a continued focus on innovation, particularly in search. Search is an unsolved problem. We have a good 90 to 95% of the solution, but there is a lot to go in the remaining 10%.

“There is a lot to go in the remaining 10%” is a huge understatement. While no one knows for sure, the deep web, where the non-Googleable database content lives, is commonly considered to be several hundred times larger than the surface web. So, even if Google has solved the whole surface web problem, they have only solved a fraction of the whole search problem. This is good news for those who make a living selling federated search solutions.

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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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