What Is Federated Search?

Oracle Secure Enterprise Search provides the capability of searching multiple Oracle
SES instances with their own document repositories and indexes. It provides a unified
framework to search the different document repositories that are crawled, indexed,
and maintained separately.

Unlike the traditional centralized search solution, federation enables distributed search. In this solution, a federation broker calls the federation endpoint to collect content matching the search criteria for the sources managed at that endpoint. Thus, this solution enables scalability, leverages an existing index and so on.

Federated search allows a single query to be run across multiple repositories. It aggregates the search results from various repositories to show one result list to the user. All query information including user credentials, are passed along with the search so that each remote application can process the query against its own document repository.