HOLISTIC FEDERATED RANKING ALGORITHM

Techniques are disclosed for generating a unified ranking of search results received from a plurality of distinct search resources. A computing system executing a federated search application receives a set of ranked search results from multiple search resources (e.g., web-based search engines, public databases and catalogs, etc.). Each search result identifies an item and includes metadata characterizing the item. The federated search application determines a unified ranking for the items identified in the search results that preserves a relative ranking of each set of items, such that a result for a given item is ranked above other results for items in the associated set of items is ranked above the other results in the unified ranking.