What Is Federated Search? Benefits, Examples, and More

New databases, product categories, and storage locations build up very quickly over short periods. One way to address the need to look through them more easily is to implement federated searching.

A federated search is a way for users to search through multiple databases and data sources at once, rather than having to search each one individually. Federated searching can be used for a variety of purposes and has many benefits, which we'll be discussing in this article.

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What Is Federated Search?

Federated search employs data federation to allow your customers to search various data sources or multiple content sources at once, making it much easier for your company to keep and convert customers. Not only that, your customer can enjoy improved engagement and efficiency.

Benefits of Federated Search

Federated search provides several benefits for your company. Here are the five main benefits:

• Customer engagement improvement: By simplifying and streamlining the search process, federated search optimizes customer engagement rates.
• Conversion increase: Federated search reduces the number of clicks needed to reach a destination, resulting in more satisfied users and increasing click-through rates.
• Search coverage and scope increase: Federated search allows using a single tool to index your content, making it more easily searchable than if each item had its own separate set of indexes.
• Enhanced security: Fewer applications mean fewer vulnerabilities, and less management equals more security.
• Enhanced search relevance: Federated search allows you to control how different types of content—such as blog posts and products—are displayed in the search results.

3 Examples of Where Federated Search Tools Can Be Applied

Federated search tools can be applied to a variety of businesses and industries. Here are three examples of where they can be effectively used today:

1. E-Commerce

E-commerce sites would benefit greatly from federated searches, as customers often don't know which category the product they're searching for falls into, especially with multiple categories to choose from. This often leads to losing sales because the customer becomes overwhelmed and responds by simply leaving the site. This way, apart from improving productivity in sales teams, better search also boosts sales from the customers' side.

2. Enterprise

Large companies with multiple products and services across one website can benefit from federated search tools and features. These would be especially helpful in knowledge management, as federated search provides cross-database searching to avoid the fragmentation of the larger business and prevent information silos.

3. Software Vendors

The third but probably the best example of where federated searches would add the most value are software vendors. This is because when a customer is searching for software, they'll need to include a list of variables in their search. If the search doesn't yield the results they require, chances are the sale will be lost—but federated search can prevent this.

Types of Federated Search

There are two main types of federated searches:

1. The search-time merging approach: Merging searches at search-time requires you to keep individual indexes for each data source used in your federated search. You query each index individually and remove duplicates by identifying results from many databases. When a search is completed, the results are compiled into one convenient location.
2. The index-time merging approach: This method involves building a unified index of your data, which is then searched via index parsing.

The two approaches have different structures and, as a result, work very differently.

Advantages & Disadvantages of Search-Time Merging

With the search-time merging approach (often referred to as query-time merging), each data source has its own search engine. As soon as the federator gets a query, it sends it to all the search engines simultaneously and waits for feedback from the search engines to present the user with a combined list of all the results.

Advantages

• It's the most straightforward approach when it comes to federated searches.
• It handles different formats because it searches each index separately—no data standardization is necessary.

Disadvantages

• Because the central search engine must wait for all the local search engines to respond before delivering the final results, response times are slower.
• If one search engine is slow to respond, the results will be held back until the slowest search engine responds.
• The search engine can struggle to rank various forms of data because relevancy is scored differently, which will make sifting through the relevance of aggregated results quite a task.

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Advantages and Disadvantages of Index-Time Merging

Index-time merging doesn't use separate search tools for each data source—instead, it uses one unified index of all the searchable data. This search solution may need a higher time investment in the beginning because you need to build a comprehensive central index.

Once built, users will get more relevant results, and the searches will complete faster. You can also tap into all data sources, including data sources that don't have local search tools.

Advantages

• It provides a better user experience, as the central index uses relevancy algorithms and sophisticated enhancements of queries.
• Results are faster because it relies on one central index and doesn't have to wait for all the search tools to respond.
• You can tap into content that doesn't have its own search engine, so you're exposed to a wider range of data.
• There are several useful features in index-time merging, including auto-complete and filtering.

Disadvantages

• The initial time necessary to create the index must be considered. Implementation time will take longer due to the initial complexity of this approach.
• The index will need extra attention over long periods of time. Every time there's a change, the index will need to re-read each item.

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Why Research Should Begin With Federated Search

For research to be meaningful, valuable, and adequate, it needs to include the review and standpoint of all schools of thought, experiences, and theories. The more data you use to extract your research, the richer your research will be—and it's very much the same with federated searches.

They help the user cover more ground, and as a result, get a more comprehensive understanding of what's available in the market. This in turn ensures customers find the most lucrative deals—it's a win-win all around!