I don’t usually post just pointers to other blogs, but I’m making an exception here. In the interesting new “Federated Search Blog” (Which I think is from someone who works for a vendor looking to get into the library federated search market?), is a great post that explains what goes into the quality of a federated search product’s search, and what might make one work better than another—in a really accessible and understandable way to the non-tech-geek. This is a topic I’ve had to try to explain to non-technologists before, and one which it’s really good for non-technologist library workers who are using and training users in this technology every day to understand. From now on, I’ll point them to this essay.
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Bibliographic Wilderness 
Thank you for the kind words and the reference to the Federated Search Blog. The blog’s about page http://federatedsearchblog.com/about/ discloses my relationship with Deep Web Technologies. Regarding, looking to get into the library market, that’s not the purpose of the blog nor Deep Web Technologies’ aim. It just so happens that much of the web content about federated search that’s worth commenting on comes from the library community.
Interesting, thanks Sol. I guess I’m still a bit confused about the purpose of the company or what it is trying to achieve with your blog. But Deep Web Technologies is engaged in federated search software for non-library markets? I guess I didn’t even realize there _was_ such a market! Curious what other businesses are interested in federated search these days.
Jonathan,
Deep Web Technologies (DWT) sells federated search solutions into a number of markets. Federal government search engines is a large market as government agencies have pressure to make their content publicly accessible and the more progressive agencies see federated search as a good way to do that . Science.gov, ScienceAccelerator.gov plus a number of other public research portals have search engines built by DWT. DWT also has business with organizations that want to federate content, not specifically for library access. The search engine for Scitopia.org, a partnership of IEEE and other science and engineering publishers, was built by DWT. Scitopia allows the public to search for abstracts of articles from among its partners.
And, DWT has library customers.
There’s lots of federated that goes on. Any web-based service that searches multiple sources (plane fares, hotel rooms, car rentals, books, journal articles) and aggregates/organizes the results is doing federation. DWT does a fair amount of customizing of its products to meet very specialized needs.
I’ll need to think about whether there’s a blog post here about what the various markets are for federated search.