1. By Abe Lederman President and CTO June 26, 2011
Understanding Differences Between Federated Search and Discovery Services
By Abe Lederman
President and CTO
June 26, 2011
Better Title:

2. About Deep Web Technologies...
Founded by Abe Lederman in 2002
A co-founder of Verity
20+ years in information business
24 person company based in Santa Fe, New Mexico
Over $5M in R&D
Pioneered federated search
Developed high profile applications
Santa Fe

3. What Is Federated Search?
Federated Search allows users to submit a real-time search in parallel to multiple information sources and retrieve aggregated, ranked and de-duplicated results.

4. One Search, Many Sources
OPACs
Blogs
Subscription
Sources
eBooks
Wikis
Enter Your Search…
Begin Search
Internal
Databases
Public Web
Sources
Journals

5. Federated Search Has Gotten A Bad Rap
It is too slow
Connectors break
Brings back too few results from each source
Brings back too many results
Unable to rank results well (meta-data differences, lack of info)

6. Federated Search vs. Discovery Services
Index
No Index
One unified index
Sources
No limit
Must have agreements
Content Bias
None
Possibly
Information Currency
Real-time return
Depends on index update
Preparation
Connector Development
Index Development
Speed
2 – 30 seconds
1 – 2 seconds
Control
Select sources
No ability to select
Alerts
Yes
Some

7. Landscape is Not So Clear
Summon (ProQuest)
Discovery Service
EDS (EBSCO)
Discovery Service + Federated Search
WorldCat Local (OCLC)
Primo (Ex Libris)
Encore Synergy (Innovative Interfaces)
Limited Discovery Service + Federated Search
Explorit (Deep Web Technologies)
Federated Search

8. Content Neutrality Do you comply with the International Coalition
of Library Consortium (ICOLC) Statement, Principle 3?
“We encourage publishers to allow their content to be made available through numerous vendors appropriate for their subject matter. We also encourage online providers and aggregators to allow their metadata to be included in emerging discovery layer services on a non-exclusive basis.”
--Carl Grant, "Gladiators" to perform sleight-of-hand at Charleston Conference.” Commentary from Carl Grant. October 30, 2010.

9. Content Neutrality -Points by Carl Grant
Is there unbiased ranking of content?
Does competition have access to content?
Can you control the ranking of results?
Does the library have control over their content?
Redo slide – Carl Grant’s remarks
Table may not be that useful
Focus on Ebsco and Proquest – focus on selling content
Base it on Carl Grant;’s article (gladiators) and give him credit
Ebsco and Summon’s will sometimes provide it for free so they can sell content

10. Lack of Transparency of Discovery Service Vendors
What is being indexed?
Which Journals/Databases
What period is covered
Currency of information
Indexing full-text vs meta-data only

11. Ability to Integrate
How easy/hard/expensive/time consuming is it to add my catalog and other internal/special sources to index?
How well do you authenticate/ integrate with link resolvers?

12. When Should You Choose Federated Search?
Access to up-to-date information is important.
You want control of your sources.
You want to search internal/non-mainstream sources
Your research is specialized (ex. medical/legal)
You have a wide range of subscribed content (ex. EBSCO and ProQuest)

13. Getting Federated Search Right
Display results incrementally
Proactively monitor information sources
Optimized connectors bring back greater number of high quality results
Do relevance ranking well
Present best results through filters and clusters

19. More Reading… Federated Search Primer Quality, Not Quantity Whitepaper
Blog articles
Discovery Services: Over-Hyped and Under-Performed
Preparing for ALA Panel and Federated Search Neutrality
Discovering the need for discovery solutions that also support meta/federated searching (Carl Grant)

20. This Powerpoint is located here:
Thank you!
Questions?
Please me:
Abe Lederman
This Powerpoint is located here: