Like most people, my search engine of choice is Google. It’s the world’s largest search engine, accessing over 8 million web pages. If Google can’t find what I’m looking for, it doesn’t exist, right?
Wrong. There’s a whole other internet out there that Google just can’t reach. It’s called the deep web, invisible web or hidden web. Invisible because most search engines can’t see it. And it’s about 500 times bigger than the internet we all know and love.
So, what’s in the invisible web? Contents of searchable databases such as library catalogues and article databases. There’s a wealth of information held in these databases that you’re missing out on by only using Google or other similar search engines.
The good news is that accessing the invisible web is easy. You can ‘google’ for databases on a particular subject by typing, for example, ‘plane crash database’ into the search bar. Once you’ve accessed the database itself, you can then interrogate it for the information you’re looking for.
There are also some dedicated tools out there that specialise in searching the invisible web. Try some of the following next time you come up emptyhanded with Google.
- Clusty: a metasearch engine ie it searches several search engines at once
- Librarians Internet Index: sites compiled by real librarians, not a computer
- Infomine: excellent for academic research
- Directory of Journal Articles: free access to full text articles from over 1,000 journals in the humanities/social sciences and science fields
