Just back from a demo of “360 Search”, a Federated Search product from Serials Solutions. Now while I have previously said that Federated Search is a load of dingos kidneys, and will never work, I have to say I was quite impressed with this offering. It still suffers from the same problem that all FS products share, namely the dependence on external providers’ response times affecting the local response. But the demo searched over 20 databases simultaneously and brought back a consolidated 450+ result set in around 60 seconds, so that’s not bad performance, considering.
One very nice feature here is the inclusion of results clustering (using software from Vivisimo), which is great, and makes narrowing of the result set easy.
We were looking at it for a very specific and narrow purpose, but … despite my previous experience and subsequent loathing of FS … I think this is good enough to put in front of students.
Time will tell.
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