I enjoyed reading the chapter on User Needs in the Understanding Digital Libraries text this week. I remember a saying that goes like this. If you give someone a fish they will eat for a day; if you teach someone to fish they will eat for a lifetime. This saying is applicable to more areas in life than just eating. The library experience and the digital library experience are a couple of these areas. Part of this chapter deals with how people search and about how they search the easiest way possible which is not always the most effective or efficient was. And yet most people seem fairly satisfied with their searches. Users want a fast and quality response. This has to do with Zipf’s Law of Least Resistance. The deep web is available, but how many people know how to use it and how many people want to learn how to use it? A comment that Lesk makes is that the Google ranking tends to put the more introductory items toward the top of the list and the more detailed items further down (Lesk 2005). This is something I did not know and yet it makes sense. When people browse in Google they are looking for something they can use and most of the time they do not need real detailed items so by virtue the number of hits on a site are going to favor the more introductory material. The use of digital libraries and databases, the deep web, and specific web addresses are going to yield more specialized or detailed items.
For more specific searches there are a few web sites that yield some information about the invisible or deep web. One site is Those Dark Hiding Places: The Invisible Web Revealed by Robert J. Lackie who is an Associate Professor-Librarian at Rider University. The invisible web exists because there is much information that is not accessible to many general search engines’ software spiders and we need to look for specific search tools that will lead us to this hidden content (Lackie 2008). Another site is the Invisible Web which was updated in February of 2006. Complete Planet is a deep web directory that was updated in 2004. Google and Yahoo are both making strides to make available to the general public what is on the deep web. Google is doing this by making information available in PDF files which used to be a format that was in the deep web (Goldsborough 2006).
References:
Complete Planet. 2004. www.completeplanet.com.
Goldsborough, Reid. 2006. Going beyond the Web’s surface. Teacher Librarian. 33 (5):52.
Lackie, Robert J. 2008. The invisible web reveled. http://library.rider.edu/scholarly/rlackie /Invisible/ Inv_Web.html.
Lesk, Michael. 2005. Understanding Digital Libraries. 2d ed. San Francisco. Morgan Kauffman Publishers, Elsevier.
The Invisible Web. 2006. home.gwi.net/brhs/invweb.html.
