Thomas Dowling wrote:
> 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?"
>   

That's why I like "broadcast search" though.  "Broadcast" is very hard 
to use to mean a local index, and once explained once will probably 
"stick".  'Broadcast' inherently means 'going out' to do your search, 
right?  Similarly, "local index".

I avoid using "federated" or "meta" to refer to one of these techniques 
specifically, because they are subject to so much confusion. But since 
these techniques are different in some crucial ways, we DO need ways to 
talk about them. I suggest "broadcast search" and "local index" (or 
"local meta-index"). 

Jonathan