What Is Federated Search and Why Is It Important

According to Statista, we will have created more than 180 zettabytes of data by 2025. If you think about it, we have never had as much information available online as we do now. That’s great as it means we can find online information on any topic imaginable and in various forms – blog posts, YouTube videos, social media posts, FAQ guides, etc.

Companies also create and share helpful content as a part of their efforts to reach out to their potential customers. The problem is that the content is usually scattered around the website, each with its own search engine and databases – and that doesn’t make for a pleasant user experience.

But the good news is there’s a way to let your users search all available content on your website through a single search box and a single query – Federated search.

What is it, and how can it benefit your website? Read on to learn more.

The traditional search engine can only handle one data source at a time. So if your website users want to find a blog post, they typically need to use the blog search engine. But if they wished to see a FAQ page, they must use the knowledge base search. What if they don’t know where to search? That makes finding the information they need even harder as they would have to click through several pages and combine the results – which is neither fast nor convenient. Meanwhile, a Federated search can provide users with results from all pages and show them on a single user interface.

Here’s an example that should make it more transparent.

Let’s say you are planning to buy a new smartphone. You already picked an affordable model with the features you want, but before buying it, you want to read more about it on the manufacturer’s website. So you open the website and see that there’s actually plenty to read – the manufacturer has a detailed product page for all their products, a knowledge base, a blog website, a reviews section, and a discussion board as well.

Now though, how can you find information about the specific phone model you picked? Using a traditional search engine means each website can only display results from its own pages – so the knowledge base can lead you to a product manual or FAQ but won’t show you customer reviews. At the same time, the blog will only give you a list of relevant articles in the results list. That means you have to search all five websites separately. Not exactly convenient, right?

The situation would look completely different with a federated search tool. First, you must only type the phone model name into a single search box. Then you would get the results from all those five pages at once – having the phone specifications, the “Getting started” guide with a FAQ list, a few tutorial videos, and also links to all reviews or discussion threads on one page.

The federated search types can also sort the results according to content type, put those on separate results lists and then display them on a single interface – making it even easier to locate specific content types.

Types of Federated search

Federated search is made of two main elements:

However, there are some differences when it comes to how the search function can interact with the data index.

1. Search-Time Merging

A search time merge (also called query time merging) is when the federated search tool passes the user’s search query to all separate search engines added to the tool and then combines the results to show the user a single result page. The biggest advantage of this type of search is that it’s the fastest and easiest to implement type of federated search – the content and data can be kept in separate indexes, and you don’t have to put the data into one specific format either.

A major flaw of this type of search is that the federated search tool has to wait for every separate search engine to respond and send the results to the federated search tool, though. If one of the search engines takes more time to process a request than the others, the entire search will take longer to complete.

As a result, the search-time merging has a slow response time compared to other federated search types.

2. Index-Time Merging

Another common type is index-time merging. A significant advantage of this search type is its faster response time than search-time merging.

Here, you create a central index for all your content sources, and the federated search application then searches through the index to find content matching the search query. Since index-time merging stores all the information in one place and doesn’t need to send requests to other engines, the search performance here is much better. In addition, the index-time merging type typically also comes with useful tools that can make the user experience even better, such as autocomplete and filtering.

For the index-time method to work at full power, you need first to create a single index with all of your content added to it and find a way to add different content types into the index. The index must also be regularly updated, especially when adding new content to the website. As a result, implementing an index-time search is slightly more complex and time-consuming than a search-time type.

3. Hybrid Federated Search

Hybrid federated search is a mix of search-time and index-time merging search types. This type of federated search uses a main central index that keeps most of the information but also looks through additional online databases that are kept separately (for example, because it would be too difficult to add the content from the database into the main index). The results are then put together to create a final list.

Compared to the search-time type, hybrid searches have fewer places to check, so they show results faster. However, since the hybrid search still has to wait for a response from the separate databases, its response time is slower than the index-time merging search.

4. The Federated Search Interface

This type works similarly to the search-time merging method (since it checks all data indexes separately), but instead of presenting the results in one combined list, it creates a separate result list per each type of content. This search method can be a handy tool for website visitors searching for specific categories or types of content. Additionally, website owners can here fine-tune the ranking of each content type so that their website visitors get the most relevant results.

Implementing this type of search requires the most work, though. First, companies should consider how the search results interface should look to make it as user-friendly as possible for potential users. What’s more, not all available federated search solutions can show different types of content in separate result lists, so you should double-check if the solution you want to implement has this feature.

Benefits of federated search

With federated search, users do not need to click through multiple pages or compare results from various pages – everything is on one page. By making it easier for users to find what they need, federated search can bring your company also several benefits:

Increases customer satisfaction and conversions rates

When users visit your site, they want to find content matching their needs as quickly and efficiently as possible – and that’s exactly what federated search can offer them.

Using it, users can search across all available content repositories and see the most relevant results on a single page. That way, they can find the information or content type they are looking for, even if they don’t know where the information might be on the website. As some studies show, conversion rates nearly doubled when people used on-site search and found what they wanted; offering federated search is a great way to convince visitors to stay on your site and buy something.

Better content discovery

Searching through and comparing results from multiple separate pages is pretty time-consuming. So to save time, users might search only one website – the one where they think they are most likely to find the information they need. By doing so, they might miss out on other helpful content pieces. As federated search can show results coming from all parts of your website, even those hidden deep within a site or database, it can guide your website users to parts of your website they didn’t even think about checking – and make them stay on your website for longer.

Improved Search Relevance

Combining all of your content into one federated search engine will also significantly increase the relevance of the search results your visitors will be getting. Simply – as there’s far more information indexed, that makes it easier for the search engine to find and guide search users to the information they seek.

Furthermore, federated search allows you to fine-tune how high each type of content should appear in the search results depending on what the website visitor is looking for to make search results more relevant – for example, putting product pages above blog posts.

Far easier content management

When you have several websites with separate content databases, keeping all content up-to-date might be difficult – especially if different teams are working on your product page content and, say, your knowledge base. With federated search, though, your employees have only one search engine to manage rather than several, so finding and updating the content inside it is much easier. Moreover, the central index can store content that doesn’t have its own index, so it can cover all content types and pieces created in your company.

Fewer security risks

Besides making managing your content more accessible, federated search can also help you secure your content databases. The fewer applications and databases that have to be managed by your team the lower the risk that the data inside it might be damaged or compromised. And in case there are any problems with how the search engine works, investigating and troubleshooting the issue will also be much faster if there’s only one search tool to test rather than if you have six different search engines to check.

What challenges does federated search bring?

Federated search can improve the search experience for both your visitors and your employees since it makes it much easier for them to find the information or content type they need. However, besides the long list of benefits, there are also a few challenges that companies trying to implement the federated search might come across.

• For some types, the implementation might be time-consuming

A search-time federated search can implement pretty quickly, but the other three types require planning and preparation. That’s because, in both index-time and hybrid search types, you must create a single data index that the search engine will use to process user queries. The indexes must also be regularly updated, especially if you add or delete content or websites.

As for the Interface method, you’ll need to spend some time designing your federated search user interface so visitors won’t have trouble using it.

• The federated search might have some trouble with ranking the results

The advantage of federated search is that you can add virtually any type of content you use in the company. If you add multiple data sources, the federated search might struggle when sorting the content in order, as each search engine may score relevance differently. That means you might need to spend some time fine-tuning how the federated search engine will rank the content.

• Content duplication

Multiple data sources increase the risk that some of the search results will be duplicated – especially in the search-time method. For example, the search engine might show a blog article and a PDF file with the same information as two different results, confusing the search users. You can prevent this problem by reviewing your data before it’s added to the search index and removing any doubles.

Conclusion

According to some studies, consumers who use search are 2.4 times more likely to buy, but only if they can find what they need with as little effort as possible. They can get exactly that with federated search.

Instead of using a few separate search engines and comparing the results coming from each, search users only need a single search and then have everything on one page, sorted by relevance or content type. And when everyone is in such a hurry, what could be more convenient for your users than a search solution that provides all the information they may need in a single click?

Frequently asked questions