23
Jul
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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21
May
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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14
Feb
ProQuest announced today that it has acquired WebFeat. Library Journal interviewed Serials Solutions general manager Jane Burke about the acquisition. Serials Solutions was acquired by ProQuest several years ago. Consolidation has occurred in the federated search industry.
Is there a story behind the story? I can only speculate, and I will — ProQuest bought WebFeat for its customer base. ProQuest already has federated search offerings through its business unit, Serials Solutions. Both WebFeat and Serials Solutions are known for their low-cost offerings and business models based on providing federated search as a service. WebFeat has sold federated search solutions to consortia (Serials Solutions hasn’t) and WebFeat has a large number of customers in that market. More customers means more service to sell. At one time Serials Solutions licensed their connectors from WebFeat. They no longer do. Plus, the press release stated that WebFeat founder and CEO Todd Miller would only be remaining with WebFeat briefly, as a consultant. So, this doesn’t strike me as a technology play even though Burke, in her interview with Library Journal, mentions a couple of WebFeat’s features that would complement Serials Solutions’ 360 Search.
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11
Jan
The ALA Midwinter Meeting starts January 11. Aside from the presentations I wrote about earlier a number of federated search vendors are exhibiting at the conference, and some of these vendors are announcing new product launches, giving talks and demonstrating their products. Here are some links to vendor information about their involvement with the conference:
If you know of others let me know and I’ll add an update to this post.
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