Navigating the Invisible Web - Invisible Information
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What Kind of Information is Commonly Invisible?
It is not surprising that quality information is hidden in the invisible space. The contents of hidden databases that power the Invisible Net vary, and they are not always of general interest. But to those who are interested in a given topic, it can be a golden mine. Some of the items that often cannot be found by major search engines are:
Dynamic sites, for instance knowledge bases, that are not forbidden for the general public but due to the way their content is generated are often skipped by search engines.
Specialized databases: medical, scientific, etc.
Court records that are available on request
Patent and trademark information
Archived publications in journals and magazines
Library catalogs
Product catalogs
Classifieds and advertisements
Multimedia content and files with special extensions that search engines exclude deliberately
News, mailing lists, postings in discussion groups (unless you perform a special newsgroups search)
Yellow & White Pages listings
The good news is that almost all that content can be found by the search tools for the Invisible Web.
How to Find Information On the Invisible Web
if your favorite restaurant still does not have a site, no search engine on Earth will help you find it. But if you are looking for information that's available and isn't deliberately hidden behind thick walls (i.e. paid sites or corporate Intranets), you will find what you are looking for. You just need some tenacity.
Briefly, what you can do is follow the search techniques (both online and offline) from the time before the advent of the major search engines. This means that hunting for resources on the Invisible Web can be done by going to: specialized directories, searcheable sites and Invisible Web Search Engines, Invisible Web Databases, Meta Search Engines, Virtual Reference Libraries, specialized portals, national search engines, non-English sites, etc. The search resources described next are by no means a comprehensive list; rather, they are listed mainly to give you an idea where to search for Invisible Web pages.
Specialized Search Directories Search directories are special collections of links that are organized hierarchically by topic. For instance the top-level topics are business, technology, entertainment, education, etc. Each of these topics have subtopics, which in turn have subtopics of their own, etc. In the above example, subtopics of business, for example could be finance, management, services, etc. If the hierarchic structure is clear, it does not take much time to check if what you are looking for is in the directory or to find a directory with the kind of stuff you want. Probably one of the most precious things about search directories is that their content is reviewed by humans and irrelevant stuff is sorted out.
Very often search directories have evolved from mere listings of tens of thousands of sites into a more organized collection of links, providing a search tool, which will help you to retrieve the desired results faster.
Examples of popular search directories are Librarians' Index to the Internet (http://lii.org/), Infomine (infomine.ucr.edu), Yahoo! (http://www.yahoo.com/ – the Directory Service, not the search engine), About.com (http://www.about.com/), the Open Directory Project (DMOZ – http://www.dmoz.org/), etc.
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