The Hidden Web: Do you know about it?
By Ria Mastromatteo, Educational Technology Consultant
The Internet currently contains 7.4 billion pages (mostly commercial). Incredible, isn't it? These pages are divided into two categories: indexable pages and accessible pages. Indexable pages are those that begin with "http" and allow search engines to retrieve them easily. These pages are called the "surface Web."
Accessible pages are everything else such as databases, current news articles, Library of Congress documents and much more. This is the "hidden Web" and is more than 500 times larger than the surface Web. Information on this hidden Web is narrower, more focused and generally of high quality. Let's examine some Web-based solutions to accessing this hidden information.
Search IQ: Directory of Search Engines (http://www.zdnet.com/searchiq/subjects/) is a directory of search engines. It has thousands of specialized search engines organized into 25 categories and sub-categories.
Are you going back to school? Do you need research from periodicals? Two sites are great for this. The first is FindArticles.com (http://findarticles.com). This gives you summaries and full-text articles from hundreds of magazines and has an easy search tool. The other is MagPortal (http://magportal.com/). It provides full-text articles and offers search capabilities.
Infomine Multiple Database Search (http://infomine.ucr.edu/search.phtml) does exactly what the name implies. It searches databases. It focuses on scholarly resources, collections, electronic journals and books, online library card catalogs and directories of researchers.
The Big Hub (http://www.thebighub.com) maintains an index of over 3,000 subject-specific searchable databases in over 300 categories. Direct Search (http://gwis2.circ.gwu.edu/~gprice/direct.htm) interfaces sites that are not readily available on the surface Web. The sites are selected and categorized by librarians.
If you've been searching unsuccessfully for that one important piece of information that you can't live without, try the hidden Web. Maybe it holds just what you're looking for.
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