Federated Search Blog (by Sol Lederman) has a series of interviews with "federated search luminaries": Erik Selberg, Michael Berman, Todd Miller. Kate Noerr of MuseGlobal, a fourth, is on her own page.
From the Michael Berman interview
"Search engines work best in the discovery phase, when searching is a fast, give-and-take, contact sport. Real-time performance is important and interaction and testing are the user mode. I frankly feel deep Web search is not terribly useful or helpful in this phase. Identifying candidate searchable databases can be very important in this phase, but that can be accomplished from a search engine for databases such as CompletePlanet or the DQM rather than going to the site directly (reserving deep Web search for the purposeful harvest mode.)
Once the researcher has got a good bead on their capture requirements, harvesting and the deep Web come to the fore. But, this can be scheduled, and need not meet a real-time criterion. "
Posted by Gwen at April 3, 2009 04:08 PM