From J.W. Lehman, founder of VerityReal Source Con...

2007-06-11T15:35:00.000-07:00

From J.W. Lehman,
founder of Verity

Real Source Content / Result Federation is alive and well

“Old Federated searchers never die, they just become…..”
anon

1. The poster hasn’t a clue about the purpose of federated search in information retrieval / research. Should “federated search” take the blame for slow/poor collection access? Of course not. Federated search is NOT, as the poster claims, an “interactive” single collection search mechanism, ala google, verity or any like…it’s a “watcher-monitor” of what is going on in the info-world in specific subject areas. If the poster told his enterprise customers they were getting google-for-the-deep-web, the poster just didn’t understand their requirements….typical for IR technology vendors, and VCs. Who cares if the answer takes 5 minutes or 5 hours? The purpose of federated search is sending-alerting new relevant material as it’s generated. Federated search is a very powerful, and quick, research assistant WHEN IT IS APPLIED PROPERLY.

Federated search supports COMMUNITIES OF INTEREST by replacing the incredibly complex need to individually access and merge content from all appropriate sources in the search for answers (regardless of their “fun-ness” to access), with a process that does it on command.

If the user can’t wait 5 minutes or 5 whatevers for results that he/she couldn’t obtain in 5 weeks-months of manual effort, then the sources themselves must be unnecessary. The poster, and most of the rest of us, have fallen under the google-spell that time to first result and time-to-answer are the same. Not! How long does it take to find the fact/assumption/relationship in google/convera/verity/zylab/inxight result # 870? We’ll Never Find It, because we gave up after result 25.

2. “keyword” search? What century is the poster from? If you can’t explore content via explicit taxonomies with the searchrules to back them up, of course you’re going to get poor, mixed up results. [and not only is clustering is dead, dead, dead…, it was never alive!]

Index everything!!!!!!!!! Why bother? Keyword search will give you the same mess on an indexed collection…actually worse, because it’s only the rare and to-date, unpopular engine that recognized the presence of evidence at the meaningful text unit (i.e. paragraph) level….so instead of federated search telling you your “KEY-WORD” is actually in the title/snippet/abstract, you now get to discover the 1000x list of content where it’s anywhere in the full-text. What an advancement!

3. Result Federation…..The ability to de-dupe, de-mystify and normalize results from multiple relevancy determination techniques has been available for years…where have you been? All that’s necessary is to make a practical relevance determination of each result based upon the search request; and order it.

4. In any subject, google-yahoo-ms-altavista-etc, lets you find out what everyone
else already knows…..the ability to find out what nobody else knows/surmises is
virtually denied. That is what federated search is for … multi-disciplined
communities of interest seeking answers to advance knowledge, as opposed to
wikipedias-google results.

Lifehacker has a post about the new Alpha search ...

2007-04-07T05:49:00.000-07:00

Lifehacker has a post about the new Alpha search from Yahoo. It's their take on bringing together search results from various sources.

Comments on .:Sixorg: Federated Search is dead, dead, dead...

From J.W. Lehman, founder of VerityReal Source Con...

Lifehacker has a post about the new Alpha search ...