Web-Scale Discovery

From ALA magazine.

Connecting users with the information they seek is one of the central pillars of our profession. Web-scale discovery services for libraries are those services capable of searching quickly and seamlessly across a vast range of local and remote preharvested and indexed content, providing relevancy-ranked results in an intuitive interface expected by today’s information seekers. First debuting in late 2007, these rapidly evolving tools are more important today than ever to understand.

Great theory, and, perhaps, a reality in some libraries, but nothing I've seen. An example of the divide in the library world between the reality of the mundane and commonplace, and the theoretical academic writing.