The FedLemur Project: Federated Search in the Real World

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. Aseries 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