Federated Search System

Federated Search is a process of unifying search results from different information sources. Several software tools specialize in this area. The working assumption is that there are many systems within the organization, each with a search engine that optimally searches within its data. The user wants to benefit from the existing knowledge in the systems and the powerful engines above them. However, they won't bother to perform a search in each source separately each time. In many cases, users are unaware of which sources contain the desired knowledge. Federated Search activates the other engines and unifies their results.

The method operates in three stages:

Stage A - Activating the engines to retrieve documents or pieces of content.

Stage B - Analysis of results to determine shared importance (RANKING).

Stage C - Unified presentation of results.

Also known by synonymous names: Unified Search and Integrated Search.

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