Federated or Broadcast or what do we call this stuff?

There's an interesting discussion happening right now on the Web4Lib Code4Lib mailing list – you can access it via the April archives; scroll down and look for the first post entitled Serials Solutions Summon.  Basically it started as a discussion about whether Summon is a revolutionary or evolutionary product, and quickly turned into a discussion around terminology.  Summon takes metadata and indexes it in one place (locally, but not necessarily local to YOU), as opposed to going out to search individual databases simultaneously.  I think I'm going to side with Jonathan Rochkind, who writes,

Both the terms "federated searching" and "meta-searching" are often used ambiguously to refer to both of these techniques. I've been trying to use "broadcast search" and "local index" to be clear about which technique I'm talking about. (I used to say 'cross-search' for 'broadcast search', but I think 'broadcast search' is more clear).

So if you've got a product that simultaneously searches across multiple databases, that's a Broadcast Search.  If you've got a product that searches one index of combined metadata, that's a Local Index Search, though even that could be made more clear for the layperson…