Greg Linden formerly of Amazon and founder of Findory posted an interesting blog post over the weekend about Google looking like it will reject federated search and instead use a local copy of all the data they collect on their own cluster. For those who don't know federated search, is when a query is sent to many search engines and the results aggregated and reranked and in more general terms is called metasearch.
While Google may be rejecting Fedeated search, and I can understand why considering the challenges, others are embracing it. This includes Deep Web Technologies who at last years Search Engine Meeting Conference discussed their experience with creating Federated search engines including Science.gov and briefly touched on a new federated search engine they were working which is Science Search. At this years Search Engine Meeting Conference (2007) they'll be talking about Federated Search of Geospatial Data -- A Case Study: Google Earth, Map Servers and CAP Alerts.
Project Phoenix which I'm working on is taking a different route than Deep Web Technologies. We won't be using Federated Search and I agree with Google. At this point I feel it's better to consolidate all the data locally.