Does federated search works for any external website?

Question

Does federated search option works to crawl external websites which are of non search engines.As i heard it is used for extenal search engines to get data in search results but can it be used for external sites as well.Pleas suggest me some ways where we can crawl external non sharepoint websites to crawl in sharepoint 2010 search.

Answer 1

Federated search will not do that. You'd need to configure a content source pointed at the external site, crawl that, then search against a scope created to look at that content source.

Federated search points directly to other external search engines.