Smart People Love Federated Search

By now most of us are pretty familiar with the “information overload” problem parodied in Bing’s current advertising campaign. In case you’re not, information overload happens when you naively use a popular search engine expecting to find some specific information, like the real-world fuel economy of a used car you’re thinking of buying, and some time later find yourself staring at a picture of two garden gnomes kissing in the back seat of a 2002 Acura RSX. (This is a real photograph, and I saved it as proof.) While “Hey, Look At This Weird Thing Google Found!” has become an actual form of entertainment in my household, conventional search engines can present real problems when used for research.

Federated search is renowned by serious researchers as a way to cut through the garden gnomes and other spurious results by searching only select information sources and by targeting the deep web. This means that an electrical engineer who wants to read up on solar cell fabrication can search for “gallium arsenic” on a federated search site like ScienceResearch.com and quickly uncover the highest-quality information because only science-specific sources are searched, instead of the entire spectrum of the Internet. (See? Serious researchers.) Additionally, at a library that subscribes to electronic resources and uses federated search to access those subscriptions, our electrical engineer would have one-stop access to full text articles that could never be located through a popular search engine.

For example, here’s what happens when I search Google for “gallium arsenic.”

First, Google corrects me. I couldn’t possibly know precisely what I’m searching for, so it changes my search term to “gallium arsenide” without my permission. This is annoying to someone who’s just pretending to be a serious researcher, so I can only imagine what our electrical engineer would be thinking if he needed to find that really great article he stumbled across not too long ago with “gallium arsenic” in the title. The next problem is that the top two results are the Wikipedia entry on gallium arsenide, and a sponsored link from a company that sells manufacturing quantities of gallium arsenide. Well, I already know what it is, and I don’t have room in my garage. There are links to scientific journals lower in the results, but they’re scattered among more commercial sites, a sustainable energy wiki, and a page advertising a conference in Oregon. Sensing that a gnome might pop up at any moment, I click “Search instead for gallium arsenic.” (At least Google offers to search for what I wanted after it’s made up my mind for me.) The same sort of results come up – not bad, but not what I need if I’m going to learn about the different substrates that are used in the fabrication of gallium arsenic cells.

Contrast this with what happens when I search ScienceResearch.com for “gallium arsenic” – or “gallium arsenide,” as the case may be. First, the search is run on the search term I asked for. Calling this a bonus of federated search might seem too much like I’m hard-selling you that used car by saying, “Plus, when you turn the key, the engine starts!” but in comparison to Google’s behavior, it’s an important feature. Now for the results: the top results are from National Institute of Standards and Technology, which just might be a more reliable source than Wikipedia, and following that is a result about “Gallium-Arsenic Substrate Fixture and Substrate Fixing Methods.”

Our electrical engineer is pleased. And with the time he saved by using federated search, maybe now he can have a little fun with Google.