READIT - 2009 - Indira Gandhi Centre for Atomic Research

Proceedings of READIT-2009, Kalpakkam - 603 102, 29-30 Dec 2009
FEDERATED SEARCH: A SINGLE INTERFACE
FOR MULTIPLE ACCESS
N.Ashok Kumar
Tamil Nadu Physical Education and Sports University
Chennai – 600 006. E-mail: salaiashok@gmail.com
ABSTRACT
In general academic community is searching more number of articles on a research topic of their own in
the Internet. Due to the Information explosion, identifying and locating a piece of information in the Internet seems
to be a difficult task. Though search engines are available to retrieve the information from the Internet, its retrieving
result is not upto the expected level, because, most of the search engines are Boolean operations based. Navigating
and searching databases, full text articles, and abstract in a single interface is the need of the hour. The Federated
Searching is a latest technique, which is being promoted by the vendors to have one stop access for databases,
abstracts and full text articles in a single interface. This paper discuss about the concept of Federated Searching, its
features, architecture, advantages and disadvantages, organizations developing federated searching engines and its
future use in academic libraries.
Key Words: Federated Search, Search Engines, Single-Interface, Search Tools.
INTRODUCTION:
In an academic environment quality research output is dependent on the research
infrastructure provided and the researchers’ talent. As such researchers expect the appropriate
knowledge source or material and the technical guidance from the institution with which they are
attached to. Among these infrastructures providing the processed information or knowledge is
the duty of the academic libraries. Most of the libraries are doing it so, but searching and
utilizing the concise knowledge to a researcher’s domain topic is found to be difficult. Even
though the researchers show preference for using the search engines namely Google, Yahoo,
AltaVista and other search engines to find information. In real practice Google and other search
engines retrieving results show that they list the contents, which has low impact for the
researchers. Usually the search engines cannot index content inside databases, which are only
accessible by filling out search forms on web pages. The large amount of high-quality scientific,
technical and business information is available in the deep web, which was not accessible
through the popular search engines.
In this context for a researcher to expect to search 1,000 databases simultaneously for
critical information is not unreasonable, while parallel searching is the domain of federated
search. Thus the new tool emerging to overcome all the difficulties is the one stop interface
called federated searching, which is the alternate solution. This paper discusses the concept of
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