(by Frank van Harmelen)

From the New York Times this Monday:

One day last summer, Google ’s search engine trundled quietly past a milestone. It added the one trillionth address to the list of Web pages it knows about. But as impossibly big as that number may seem, it represents only a fraction of the entire Web.

Beyond those trillion pages lies an even vaster Web of hidden data: financial information, shopping catalogs, flight schedules, medical research and all kinds of other material stored in databases that remain largely invisible to search engines.

The challenges that the major search engines face in penetrating this so-called Deep Web go a long way toward explaining why they still can’t provide satisfying answers to questions like “What’s the best fare from New York to London next Thursday?” The answers are readily available - if only the search engines knew how to find them.

(thanks to Mike Brodie for pointing to this one)

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Tags: Database, Deep Web, Google, Web search engine

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