Federated search

Federated search is an information retrieval technology that allows the simultaneous search of multiple searchable resources. A user makes a single query request which is distributed to the search engines participating in the federation. The federated search then aggregates the results that are received from the search engines for presentation to the user.  “Federated Search“.  It’s the term used to describe the process of simultaneously searching multiple search engines or online databases from a single search box. Federated search is closely related to meta-search.  If you’ve ever used dogpile.com, then you’ve experienced federated/meta-search search. Dogpile is a meta-search engine, meaning that it gets results from multiple search engines and directories and then presents them combined to the use. Other meta-search engines you may have heard of include Clusty, SurfWax, Search.com, Mamma.com, and Ithaki for Kids.

With traditional search engines like Google, you will only find pages/sources that have already been indexed by that engine’s crawler, meaning the millions of documents from the deep web will not be found. Federated and meta-search is a technique to resolve this issue and make deep web content searchable and findable. One of the best aspects of federated search is the single search box. From one search box, you get to search numerous underlying data sources. This helps the searcher because he/she does not need knowledge of each individual search interface or even knowledge of the existence of the individual data sources being searched. There are hundreds of meta-search and federated search tools available, in a wide variety of subjects, with new ones appearing all the time. Case in point: ScienceResearch.com. ScienceResearch.com provides a single point of access to more than 400 high-quality, publicly searchable science and technology collections.

Purpose

Federated search came about to meet the need of searching multiple disparate content sources with one query. This allows a user to search multiple databases at once in real time, arrange the results from the various databases into a useful form and then present the results to the user.