Friday, November 7, 2008
Week 10 Readings - The Deep Web
Clearly the theme this week is searching for content on the web! This article confirmed what I think we all instinctively know: there is a great deal of high quality information available that exists in formats that most search engines cannot index. I was particularly intrigued to read that most of Bergman's selected sites in what he calls the Deep Web for his survey are open sites. Yet a typical search done on a search engine most likely will not find it, and this is the way most people look for information on the Web. Many of these sites I've been to myself-Pubmed, NOAA, InfoUSA-and when I think about it, often I just went to the site directly for additional research AFTER using a search engine. I'm sure many in our class will have had that same experience. This really gives me a lot to think about for the role of libraries in providing the "directed query technology" that Bergman advocates. We clearly have a role to play.
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2 comments:
Yeah, I noticed that I already went to a lot of the "deep web" sites listed in this article. I went to NOAA initially, years ago, after searching hurricane info, as weather/com just wasn't cutting it. Now I go to NOAA every day, just about, for all sorts of weather info.
I agree, I find it interesting that the free sites tend to be the ones with the incredible amounts of information. I remember having read about that in the past - that it's just too much information for indexing programs to handle so they ignore places like NOAA.
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