The Distant Librarian RSS feed

I found a link to an article from The Blog Libific in The Distant Librarian which is one of my RSS feeds that I just added to my Bloglines account at: www.bloglines.com/public/campanella. The article is about federated searching using library databases and Google. Federated searching allows someone to search several databases at one time. It is a wonderful tool for a person researching something to be able to search many databases and an internet search engine all at the same time and review the results retrieved. But Google does not want libraries setting up federated searching and showing the Google results along with the library database results. Google does not want a researcher to get to Google results without going through the Google page first. Some people believe that Google sees federated searching as a competitor and does not want to see their results alongside results from other content providers. Perhaps Google is most worried about showing their advertising products that support their business model, and that is why they will not allow their search results to show alongside other database results. I found this article so interesting because our library staff just had a meeting the other day and we discussed federated searching and how search results would be displayed and we discussed Google in our conversation.