The "Invisible Web," or "Deep Web"

Hi Bloggers,

I posted a ‘Comment’ to Shelly-Ann’s blog with the same trend of thought as this blog post, but I found that I should not take it for granted that you will visit her blogspot and the information is so informative.

I agree that there is a lot of information on the World Wide Web. However, after doing my evaluation of Websites, I found that a lot of valuable (seminal) work was not published. Have you ever experienced trying to source some pertinent information and getting “This page is unavailable”, over and over. Isn’t it frustrating? What I realize is that there exists an “Invisible Web,” or “Deep Web,” which contains information that cannot be indexed by search engines because it is hidden within databases. Therefore, we owe it to students to make them truly understand that there is a great deal of information that they will not find on-line.

In general, students should be aware that any proprietary or copyrighted information is not generally available on-line for free, at least not legally. A good rule of thumb is that if an information resource costs money in print format, it probably costs money on the Web too, if it is also available there. A huge amount of information is simply not available via the Internet, for free or for a fee. This means that with the explosion of electronic information over the past few decades, there are electronic archives, research datasets, and personal and organizational records “out there” that may never be preserved, not to mention made public.

The significance of this blog is that while the Internet can be an excellent place to conduct research, relying on it exclusively will mean missing a great deal of valuable information.