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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[ Editor’s note: Is metasearch a bad idea? If, after reading this article by Carl Grant, you still think it is, send me your rebuttal. If it’s well written - whether or not I agree with it - I’ll publish it.

Carl Grant is President of Ex Libris North America. With more than a quarter century of experience in the library-automation industry, I’m grateful for his periodic articles in this blog. ]

“We don’t really need metasearch…” is a phrase I’ve heard several times lately and I have to admit it that has the same effect on me as fingernails being dragged across a blackboard. That’s because this position implies:

• The user’s ease-of-use in accessing and discovering (particularly new) resources is a low priority at your organization.

• You believe a user should talk to you (a trained searcher or librarian) before trying to access resources so that you can question them and direct them to the best resource for their need.

• You believe the functionality obtained by using the custom interface written for a particular database is so important that you discount the useful results that the metasearch engine delivers for that database.

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[ Editor’s note: A few weeks ago I asked Carl Grant if he’d be willing to write a regular column for this blog. He agreed in principle while expressing the concern that his new responsibilities as President of Ex Libris North America might make it difficult to commit to a schedule. So, I took the pressure off of Carl by inviting him to write when he was able to and not worry about a schedule. Not too long after that conversation I received an email from Carl with the article below.

As usual, Carl doesn’t mince words in this article. He bluntly asks librarians to assert and uphold the value they provide to their patrons by demanding functionality from their federated search vendors that “feature[s] the added value of librarianship.” ]

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There are lots of terms used interchangeably with “federated search.” I was interested to know how frequently each of these synonyms was used since I maintain a bunch of alerts related to various of these terms to keep an eye out for interesting web pages, blog posts, and events. So I set out to do some exploration with Google. Here are the eight terms (quoted phrases) I googled for (in alphabetical order) and noted the document counts for:

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