FUSE Search Ultimate Guide: Federated Search
What is Federated Search?
Federated search allows your website visitors to search multiple data sources at one time. Instead of only displaying results from your website’s content, federated search technology aggregates data from multiple applications - like an online publication or community, for example - and blends it all together into a single point of access.
For instance, imagine you are a student working on a research paper and need to gather information from multiple sources such as academic journals, online databases, and library catalogs. Without federated search, you would have to perform multiple searches across each source, which can be time-consuming and frustrating. However, federated search websites like CORE (as one of many examples) gather data from multiple providers - in CORE’s case, they collect data from over 11,000 sources - allowing users to get access to all of it with one simple query.
Federated search is not limited to academic research, of course. And while your organization likely has fewer than 11,000 third-party data points to pull from, the theory is the same.
Imagine pulling together the content from all of your disparate third-party systems and making it searchable from your website.
That’s what we’re talking about here. And it’s powerful.
Here’s a screenshot of a federated search results page from our client International Association for the Study of Pain:
Example federated search results.
Notice how the search results display the various sources of the content and then the facet options on the left help the user filter what they would like to see. This is how user-friendly aggregating information into one search results page can be.
What are the Benefits of Federated Search?
User Benefits
Increased efficiency. Curating data from multiple databases can save time and reduce the number of searches a user needs to perform to find what they need. All because your site is aggregating data into one place. Cool.
Improved accuracy. Federated search can not only provide more comprehensive results, but it can also be set up to eliminate duplicate data, prioritize results by relevancy, display content by creation date, and endless other variables.
Improved decision-making. Federated search provides users with more comprehensive and accurate data, allowing them to make more informed decisions. They have access to the big picture with the confidence that they have all bases covered.
Your Organizational Benefits
Enhanced data analysis. Because you’re indexing and tracking data from multiple knowledge bases, you’re able to keep a close eye on which content sources are providing the most accurate and even most popular content.
Increased productivity. No more entering duplicate content to cover the holes between third-party systems. Sure you’ve got a job posting in your app, but you want it on your site, too. Double entry? No more.
Cost savings. Integrating federated search features into your website will definitely have upfront costs, but over time the ease of administration and seamless delivery of content will allow you to spend time doing better things.
How Does Federated Search Work?
There can be a few different technologies and methods at play including APIs, structured feeds, stored procedures, content crawls, and data dumps. Our first step is to programmatically connect - using one of the methods mentioned - with the content stored across your various systems. Then, based on pre-set parameters, programming code gathers data from each system and saves it to an indexed database. That database then serves as the centralized source that your website searches against. Once in place, you’re ready to present a unified, user-friendly search experience to your users.
Key Features of a Stellar Federated Search Product
Intuitive User Interface
A quality federated search product should have an intuitive user interface. It should be easy to navigate, visually appealing, and equipped with advanced filtering capabilities to help users refine and customize their searches.
Robust Search Algorithms
A robust federated search should enable intelligent query processing, relevance ranking, and content filtering to ensure users receive the most accurate and valuable results from the data set.
This code may look tricky to you but federated search done well is an easy gift you’ll wish you had given yourself sooner.
Secure Data Handling
Privacy and data security are paramount. A stellar federated search solution includes robust security features like encryption, authentication, and access control ensuring sensitive information remains secure throughout the search process.
Types of Content You Can Include in Federated Search
The options are truly endless, but here are some examples of content types you can include in your federated search:
Pages, documents, and images from your website/content management system.
Content that lives in your CRM/AMS.
Posts and discussions from your online community.
Messages sent via your email marketing platform
Courses from your learning management system (LMS).
Articles and books from publishers’ websites.
Calendar listings from your event management system.
Products from your e-commerce platform.
Open positions from your job board.
Videos from apps like YouTube, Vimeo, Brightcove, Wistia, and more.
Announcements and interactions from your social media accounts.
Data from your Intranet or Cloud-based storage.
Implementing Federated Search: Best Practices and Considerations
Define Your Objectives and Requirements
Before implementing federated search, it's essential to clearly define your objectives and requirements. Identify the specific data sources you want to integrate and the functionalities you need from the federated search solution. This step will guide you in selecting the right solution and ensure it aligns with your business goals.
Seamless Integration and Compatibility
When integrating federated search into your existing tech and web infrastructure, compatibility is key. Ensure that the federated search solution can seamlessly integrate with your databases, websites, and other relevant systems. Compatibility ensures a smooth implementation process and minimizes disruptions.
User Training and Support
Introducing a new search solution requires proper training and support for your team. Provide comprehensive training materials, tutorials, and user guides to help your team navigate and maximize the potential of federated search. Ongoing support and assistance will ensure a successful transition and optimal utilization of the solution.
How We Do Federated Search at FUSE
The first step is to identify the third-party data sources you would like to include in your federated search ecosystem. Whether it’s a system we have integrated with before or not, our tech allows us to seamlessly connect with any online application using an API, data export, RSS, or stored procedure.
Once you have selected your systems, we simply link our FUSE Search platform to their association systems. From there, we pull data from those systems and combine it all into a single data pool that your website will search from.
We do not do a real-time call into those third-party systems (search-time merging) because that would slow down your site performance unnecessarily. It does mean, of course, that depending on how often we refresh the data, some search results are what we call near real-time.
Instead what we do is index-time merging where we create a central index for all of your data sources, then parse that index to provide search results.
FUSE pulls from each source of content — public and private — into an aggregated index.
Beyond Your Website with Federated Search
Federated search is not limited to merely enhancing the search experience on a website alone. In the world of enterprise knowledge management, federated search is a powerful tool that can collect intelligence and streamline information discovery across diverse systems.
Here are a few examples:
Unifying Data Across Internal Systems
Companies of all sizes often have a multitude of internal systems and databases that house valuable information. Federated search enables organizations to connect these disparate systems, consolidating data from various sources into a centralized search interface. And this can allow your team then to access critical information while eliminating silos and fostering collaboration.
Streamlining Document Management
Document management is key to enterprise-class organizations and federated search can help. It seamlessly integrates with document management systems, enabling users to retrieve documents, files, and records from multiple repositories using a single search query. This streamlined approach obviously saves time and effort, ensuring that your team can locate the right documents quickly and efficiently.
Enhancing Collaboration and Knowledge Sharing
Federated search facilitates collaboration by breaking down information barriers within an organization. It empowers teams to search for and share insights across various systems and databases, promoting a culture of knowledge sharing and collaborative problem-solving. With federated search, your team can tap into the collective intelligence of the organization, accelerating innovation and fostering continuous learning.
Enhancing Customer Support and Service
Federated search can play a vital role in improving customer support and service. By integrating with customer relationship management (CRM) systems, knowledge bases, and support ticketing platforms, federated search empowers customer service representatives to quickly access relevant information, troubleshoot issues efficiently, and provide accurate responses to customer inquiries. This streamlined approach enhances the customer experience and ensures consistent and effective support.
FUSE Search Client Success Story
Our client is an established medical nursing association with an extensive online presence that includes a public website, a library of our educational resources, a career center, podcasts, videos, and an online community.
They selected the best, most advanced systems they could find to serve their tech-savvy membership. And while these excellent resources offered relevant, high-quality content, there was still a problem. The content was difficult to discover and even more difficult to circulate. Users had to bounce from site to site to consume each bit of information about the topic they were interested in.
The minute they saw the capabilities of FUSE Search to aggregate content from disparate systems and display it all within one universal results page, they knew they had the solution they were looking for. We worked with them to not just identify their data sources but to also come up with a comprehensive taxonomy, craft an overarching content strategy, and determine how specific content should be weighted and ranked.
Their web engagement is way up since the implementation. They said it best themselves: “Now when people search they might find pages from the website, but they will also find sessions from our conference, podcasts, videos, jobs and community posts. It was a real gamechanger.”
In Closing
Now’s the time to take your site search to the next level. By implementing federated search, you can unlock a wealth of knowledge, improve efficiency, enhance collaboration, and empower your users with seamless access to information. Let the power of federated search transform the way you think about content and share information. Our clients call it a game-changer for a reason.