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On Apr 21, 2009, at 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. Yes, to me, the quoted phases above are synonymous. But I believe we are also seeing a new type of index manifesting itself, and this new index has yet to be named. Specifically, I'm thinking of the index where various types of content is aggregated into a single index and then queried. For example, instead of providing a federated search against one or more library catalogs, a Z39.50 accessible journal article index, a local cache of harvested OAI content, etc., I think we are beginning to see all of these content silos (and others) brought together into a single (Solr/ Lucene) index and searched simultaneously. I'm not sure, but I think this is how Summon works. -- Eric Lease Morgan Head, Digital Access and Information Architecture Department Hesburgh Libraries, University of Notre Dame