Federated Searching Misconceptions
I found a link on Catalogablog about an article from Information Today that tells The Truth about Federated Searching. I’d have to agree wholeheartedly with everything it has to say despite working on my library’s own version of a federated search. To be fair, the point that relevancy ranking is not totally relevant is not a problem just for federated search. Relevance is never totally relevant even for the best search engine (Cf. D.R. Swanson’s postulates of impotence from _Historical Note: Information Retrieval and The Future of an Illusion. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 39(2):92-98, 1988_). It may be true, though, that relevance is further obscured by federated searching.
I think we, at Lane, have side-stepped most of the misconceptions for our own search, at this point at least, because it doesn’t aspire to be any more than an overview of what is provided by each of the individual engines. We pass the users on to the source rather than try to digest (munge together) all the search results into one interface. Hopefully, we are just trying to act as tool that lets the user choose where to go rather than actually tells them this source or this result is the best and what “you” are actually seeking. When it comes to searching, we shouldn’t be an aggregator but, rather, a facilitator.
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