On 04/21/2009 10:40 AM, Mike Taylor wrote:
> I, and most of the people I've worked with, have been using the terms
> "metasearch", "federated search", "broadcast search" and "distributed
> search" synonymously for years.  Have they now settled down into
> having distinct meanings?  If anyone could summarise, I'd be grateful.


We've occasionally tried to disambiguate those terms for some purposes around
here and realized that, if most people use them synonymously, they're synonyms.
 You can define differences between meta-, federated, and broadcast search, but
every discussion on the topic will be punctuated by people asking, "Wait,
what's the difference again?"

We've started using "unified index" or "local index" for "stuff we get in
advance, load here, and search in place"; and good old "metasearch" for "stuff
scattered in umpteen different locations to which we send searches on demand
and collate results".


-- 
Thomas Dowling
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