WoW! Wouter over het Web

The Deep Web, the Hidden Web or the Invisible Web has always attracted my attention. In Internet classes I teach I do pay quite a bit of attention to this phenomenon. It is odd to see though, that there is relatively little attention for the Deep Web in the body of scholarly literature. As though everybody is content with their Google results. This year I pointed already to a study by Lewandowski & Mayr (2006) which looked at the original estimates of Bergman (2001). In all likelihood the deep web was less deeper than suggested in 2001. We still remain with the question how deep?
Too date most of the articles cover the invisible web from a rather technical perspective. In a recent article in the Journal of Documentation Ford and Mansourian (2006) take an entirely different approach. They put forward a cognitive model for the invisible web. The model is based on two axes. The horizontal axis indicating the level of uncertainty that the information is "out there", and the vertical axis indicating whether information is successfully retrieved or not. In the upper left had corner, you have the bright zone. The bright zone where web search experiences "lacked any perceived level of failure -and indeed difficulty- entailing the straightforward retrieval of relevant information via search engine without problems". The refracted zone is the upper right hand corner. In this zone the "searcher finds relevant information by means other than a search engine via bookmarked websites and or URLs given by friends or colleagues. This category represents a gradation in the move from total visibility to total invisibility".
The lower part of the graph is reserved for the veiled zone and the dark zone. The veiled zone is the area of "perceived failed searches. The users searched expecting to find information via a search engine but realises that s/he has failed to locate it". The dark zone is where searchers are "very unsure whether or not the information is "out there" or not and retrievable with greater effort or skill on their part."
This model will certainly help in classes to explain the concepts of the invisible web a little bit better. Certainly the examples the authors extracted from their interviews will help to improve teaching. Worth reading.

Literature
Bergman, K. T. (2001). The deep web : surfacing hidden value. The Journal of Electronic Publishing 7(1). http://www.press.umich.edu/jep/07-01/bergman.html
Ford, N. and Y. Mansourian (2006). The invisible web: An empirical study of "cognitive invisibility". Journal of Documentation 62(5): 584-596.
Lewandowski, D. and P. Mayr (2006). Exploring the academic invisible web. http://eprints.rclis.org/archive/00006071/

Technorati tags Deep Web; Invisible Web; Hidden Web

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