[Sigia-l] Best Bets - a Federated Search?

[Avi Rappoport]

Interesting questions!

In my research, I see term "Federated Search" is generally used for a 
system which sends queries to external search engines and databases 
and shows results in one place.  It's very much like a metasearch, 
with less implication of screen-scraping and more of sending queries 
and receiving results in non-HTML formats (such as SQL).    Verity 
has a pretty good demo of this in their portal product.  I use 
"Distributed Search" for something with an actual search protocol, 
like Z39.50.

Anyway, all the manual recommendations systems I've seen let you make 
a list of the query terms and the pages associated with them (usually 
URLs and titles).  So having the search engine do a lookup there as 
well as a real search in the main index is federating two sources.

Yahoo's directory-first system is a federated search: less of a 
manual recommendation (or Best Bets) because it doesn't have a human 
connecting the query terms and the URLs.  The folks doing the Yahoo 
directory are aware that their text will be searched, but they're not 
primarily thinking of findability, so it's not quite a manual process.

Avi

At 5:54 PM +1000 10/1/02, Eric Scheid wrote:
>Is Best Bets an example of a federated search system?
>
>At first, I thought yes. They are presented in the same segmented manner
>that federated searches usually are, and they could be implemented on the
>backend as two distinct databases ... yet ultimately they point to the
>same destination as the raw index searches. In a way this is akin to
>meta-search, where some of the search sources cover only a niche  (eg.
>biomed, or Los Angeles blogs). And yet, in my gut this doesn't sit quite
>right.
>
>Anyone care to shed some light on this - are there formal definitions
>(eg. taught in LIS) for Federated Search?
>
>Would Yahoo's inclusion of results from it's directory along with the
>wider "internet search" be considered a best bets search example?

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