One small step for Science.gov, one giant leap for Federated Search. “Science.gov is a gateway to more than 42 scientific databases and 200 million pages of science information with just one query, and is a gateway to more than 2,000 scientific websites from 18 organizations within 14 federal science agencies. These agencies represent 97% of [...]
Filtering results is as much an art as a science. Refining or clarifying an initial set of search results is a fairly common practice among search engine users that don’t know exactly what they are looking for. Yet in federated searching, refining a group of results is often not the best strategy for a user to find [...]
**(12/2/2010) Updated section “Full-text or metadata only” This blog article is written by Abe Lederman, President and CTO of Deep Web Technologies: A couple of weeks ago I had the pleasure of attending the Charleston Conference. It was my first time attending this conference and also my first time in Charleston, South Carolina, a city [...]
Last week (on November 23rd) Sol wrote an article for the Federated Search Blog, Beyond search results bias, which raises the concern over search result bias by Google and by discovery services. Sol refers to the allegation by Harvard Professor Benjamin Edelman that Google is biasing some of its search results by first displaying results [...]
Federated search is only as good as the connectors to the underlying sources. The care and quality with which connectors are written are important to the quality of the results that are brought back from the API or native search interface . Connectors are typically cited as a weak point in federated search. However, Deep Web [...]
A few weeks ago I started receiving some Biznar Alerts on DRAGNET a new “federated search” application developed by the New York Law School Library. A quick look told me that this isn’t a federated search application at all. DRAGNET searches the Google index through a Google Custom Search Engine that limits searches to a [...]
The Federated Search Blog brings an important set of observations about search to our attention. Search pundit Avi Rappoport makes it clear that it’s not so clear that discovery services are the holy grail of search nor the answer to everybody’s search problem. Search is complicated. As Sol Lederman writes in the Federated Search Blog [...]
One of the critical problems in federated searching is de-duplication of results. Many sources contain the same journal articles and, clearly, presenting the same result multiple times isn’t useful to users. To solve this thorny problem, Deep Web Technologies has taken a flexible and configurable approach to de-duplication. The Explorit application de-dupes on multiple fields to [...]
This afternoon, I put aside an hour from yet another hectic day to read Dr. Walter Warnick’s article, “Federated Search as a Transformational Technology Enabling Knowledge Discovery: the Role of WorldWideScience.org.” This article by Dr. Warnick–or Walt to me–presents a wonderful overview of OSTI’s mission dating all the way back to 1947. OSTI (Department of Energy [...]
