Internet federated search engines for bookseller databases: a comparative evaluation.

This contribution reports on an investigation and evaluation of freely available federated search engines for bookseller databases on the Internet.
Introduction:
These systems can be useful as they allow users to find relevant book titles, detailed bibliographical information of a known book, dealers who have a particular book for sale and the prices they ask, the value of a book and so on.
Methodology:
Individual book titles were searched, each one in various systems simulating normal usage and results for couples book & dealer were compared.
Results/findings:
Remarkable behavior of federated search systems and qualitative as well as quantitative differences between several systems are reported. Two systems performed best on average and these were investigated in more detail: http://www.bookfinder.com/ and http://www.addall.com/ with http://used.addall.com/ for used books.
Conclusion:
This investigation has clarified the state of the art of the usefulness of federated Internet book search systems for librarians as well as other users.
For an abundant book title most book dealer database search tools will probably satisfy the user; however, in the case of a scarce book title, it is wise to choose a federated search system with a great coverage and more than one search system can serve as complementary search tools as their user interface, features and coverage is far from identical.