[Web4lib] Federated Search versus Crawler or Spider

[Andrew Ashton]

 Ross Singer wrote:
"2) the onus is on the content providers to provide a standardized
search interface - you lose all control about what is indexed/how it's
indexed and how search results are presented"

This seems to be the kiss of death for any really useful Federated
search projects.  Remember the 
OCLC SiteSearch project?  We did a proof-of-concept test here at
Skidmore College and discovered quickly that the lack of vendor
standardization made it impractical.  Librarians are nothing if not
completists, and offering a Federated Search service that only covered
2/3 of our resources wasn't going to cut it.  Sure, you could buy a
Federated Search product and let the vendor worry about maintaining
access to the non-standardized targets, but any technology that
precludes community development ought to be considered dead in the
water.

--
Andrew Ashton
Systems Librarian
Scribner Library, Skidmore College
(518)580-5505