[Web4lib] Faceted navigation as metasearch

[K.G. Schneider]

> Karen, The problem with metasearch is that you're working with retrieved
> sets -- and with the data in different formats. 

Right, which is why it is known to be glacially slow. It goes back to the
question of whether we should continue attempting to search in real-time
across heterogeneous datasets (hence my Google Scholar question-because it's
preprocessed data goo).

The library-based metasearch applications have capabilities built in around
database providers' capabilities (I almost wrote limitations...), while the
faceted-nav search engines probably kick butt in the area of search engine
functionality but aren't (yet) customized around anything not XML-ish. But
neither can really get around the problems inherent to searching these
databases in real-time-though it would be interesting to know if the
faceted-nav search engines were faster. 

K.G. Schneider
kgs at bluehighways.com