The FedLemur project: Federated search in the real world

✍ Scribed by Thi Truong Avrahami; Lawrence Yau; Luo Si; Jamie Callan

• Book ID: 101653550
• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 2006
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 165 KB
• Volume: 57
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 1532-2882
• DOI: 10.1002/asi.20283

✦ Synopsis

Abstract

Federated search and distributed information retrieval systems provide a single user interface for searching multiple full‐text search engines. They have been an active area of research for more than a decade, but in spite of their success as a research topic, they are still rare in operational environments. This article discusses a prototype federated search system developed for the U.S. government's FedStats Web portal, and the issues addressed in adapting research solutions to this operational environment. A series of experiments explore how well prior research results, parameter settings, and heuristics apply in the FedStats environment. The article concludes with a set of lessons learned from this technology transfer effort, including observations about search engine quality in the “real world.”