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Metasearch Smackdown
February 1, 2008

Many of you are no doubt familiar with the metasearch offerings of the standard set of library systems vendors. But I doubt a lot of you know about Deep Web Technologies, which is behind such efforts as Science.gov and Scitopia.org. That will change. They're intent on making a mark in the library metasearch market, and I wouldn't bet against them.

They recently kicked off a Federated Search blog, and if you're interested in this topic it is likely to be worth adding to your feed reader. But that isn't what sparked this post. It was their proposal to create a site that potential customers could use to evaluate all the available metasearch applications. Now that would be very useful to anyone trying to make their way through the maze of vendor claims to select a system.

Here's the proposal:

1. I [Sol Lederman] will create a vendor resource page to include offerings from any provider of federated search, commercial or not.
2. I will include vendor name, product name, URL to federated search offerings, and contact information in the vendor resource page.
3. We as a community of vendors, customers, and potential customers select 10 high quality and reliable sources of general interest to libraries. These sources should be public sources, not requiring subscription access or authentication.
4. Each vendor builds a publicly available demo application using the 10 selected sources.
5. Each vendor provides me with a logo plus the javascript and/or form parameter information to code a search box for a basic search.
6. I wire up search boxes for everyone who participates.
7. I promote the web page so that as many people as possible can benefit from it.

See the post for the proposed timeline. I encourage (dare I say "dare"?) all metasearch vendors (and non-vendors -- do you hear me, LibraryFind.org?) to participate. This is a really cool idea, but it will only be effective if those who should participate do. Let your vendor know you want to see them there.

Posted by Roy Tennant on February 1, 2008 | Comments (0)