How “deep” is the web in relation to google?
Internet search in modern days can be compared to dragging a net across the surface of the ocean. Although a significant amount may be caught in the net, there is an enormous amount of information that is extremely deep to find – largely hidden behind query forms of many searchable databases, and as a result, this information is missed by traditional search engines like google, yahoo and Bing.
The deep Web is quite different from the surface Web. “Deep Web” sources store their content in searchable databases that only produce results dynamically in response to particular requests.
A very simple view of how traditional search engines work is – search engines create indeces by crawling the web. In order for a web page to be discovered, the page must be static and linked to other pages. As a result, traditional search engines cannot find content in the deep Web, since those pages do not readily exist until they are produced dynamically as the result of a particular search query.
While google remains largely influential because of its market share, many people still percieve that as “Quality” search. When in actual fact, in most cases its not.
However, “Quality” can be subjective. What certain people may perceive as quality, others may feel otherwise. But, a quality search result does not consist of a long list of website hits, but the “right” list. For example, the search results google returns to searchers is a long list of websites ranked mostly on the basis of popularity, but it does not necessarily provide users the answers users seek. In most cases, Google cannot provide those answers as it is only able to cover the surface Web, while the answers might be found in the deep web — which more often than not, are completely out of Google’s reach.
In conclusion, We would like to know — How influential is Google to your everyday internet search? Do you percieve that as “Quality” results ? and more importanly, How do you search internet in pursuit of quality results?