By Guest Author Sol Lederman
The Federated Search Blog

Charles asked for someone to explain the difference between distributed search, federated search, and faceted search. And, he wanted the explanation to be in layman’s terms. These “definition” articles are actually tougher to write than they look because it can be tough to define something I know about but never consider articulating. But, whining aside, here’s my attempt at defining the terms:

Distributed search

Distributed search queries a number of sources simultaneously.

Federated search

Federated search queries a number of sources simultaneously.

Faceted search

Faceted search guides users to the best results for their queries via a refinement process. First, the user performs a text search as he would in Google or other popular search engine. Then, the results found in the text search are organized by categories, more technically known as facets. For example, a faceted search for “Mexico” might offer users the opportunity to refine results by such facets as topic (history, language), language (English, Spanish), date published, etc. Note that in faceted search there can be different ways to categorize the same content. (I want to thank Daniel Tunkelang for contributing to this definition.)

I know of no difference between “federated search” and “distributed search.”

Faceted search is a fundamentally different beast that the other two. Faceted search is an approach to refining results and to guiding users to the best results from a set of results once that set has been found.

Federated and distributed search are approaches to getting those results in the first place, by searching multiple content sources.

If you enjoy these questions of defining and naming things you may like this article and this one too.

This links to a long post about a long video, but they are both very educational.  Thanks to Sol for the great content!

Steve Jurvetson is a Managing Director of Draper Fisher Jurvetson, a leading venture capital firm. Jurvetson, at last week’s 11th annual Churchill Top Tech Trends event, spoke about a trend toward decentralized search which could dramatically change how many of us think about federated search. WebWare covered the event and discussed the trend:

Venture capital whiz-kid Steve Jurvetson gave an impassioned pitch for this trend, which he called, “The triumph of the distributed Web.” He said the aggregate power of distributed human activity will trump centralized control. His main point was that Google, and other search engines that analyze the Web and links, are much less useful than a (theoretical) search engine that knows not what people have linked to (as Google does), but rather what pages are open on people’s browsers at the moment that people are searching. “All the problems of search would be solved if search relevance was ranked by what browsers were displaying,” he said.

Jurvetson believes that the future is “federated search,” in which the Web’s users don’t just execute search queries, they participate in building the index by the very act of searching, immediately and directly.

Watch Jurvetson speak about “the Triumph of the Distributed Web.”

Sol Lederman and his brother Abe Lederman (DeepWeb – an AltSearchEngines sponsor) discuss the video in a post on his blog Federated Search Blog here.

By Sol Lederman of the Federated Search Blog

Recent versions of Firefox and Internet Explorer make it relatively straightforward for users to add search engines to their browser’s search menu if the search engine provider includes some OpenSearch magic in their site. I recently wrote about OpenSearch in relation to Yahoo! Alpha and this article shows a different way this technology is used.

Blog sponsor and federated search vendor Deep Web Technologies recently announced a set of browser search plugins for a number of major science search applications, including six federated search applications which are powered by Deep Web Technologies’ Explorit technology.

Plugins were created for these applications:

• WorldWideScience.org
• Science.gov
• ScienceResearch.com
• Mednar
• E-Print Network
• Scitopia.org
• Scirus

To read the rest of this article click here: