Federated Searching – Good Ideas Never Die

Barbara Quint, editor-in-chief of Information Today’s Searcher: The Magazine for Database Professionals has written yet another dazzling federated search article.   “A good federated system imposes a tremendous burden on the builders so the users can feel the search process as effortless.”  Indeed, at Deep Web Technologies, that is exactly what we feel we are doing. We’re creating search systems for our clients that require very little effort on their end, but do exactly what they need.  Her assessment of what produces quality searches (or the lack of them) is spot on as well:

More important, however, are the problems of truly making the systems perform effectively for end-users. Basically, a lot of human intelligence and expertise, not to mention sweat and persistent effort, has to go into these systems to make them “simple” and effective for users. For example, most of the databases have field structures where key metadata resides. A good federated system has to know just how each field in each database is structured and how to transform a search query to extract the needed data. Author or name searching alone involves layers of questions. Do the names appear firstname-lastname or last name-comma-firstname? Are there middle names or middle initials? What separates the components of the names – periods, periods and spaces, just spaces? The list goes on and on – and that’s just for one component.

The article also mentions our company President, Abe Lederman as well as several public-facing portals powered by Deep Web Technologies.  Thank you, Barbara!