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November 17, 2003

The Ambiguity Inherent in the Invisible Web

It is very difficult to predict what sites or kinds of sites or portions of sites will or won't be part of the Invisible Web. There are several factors involved:

Which sites replicate some of their content in static pages (hybrid of visible and invisible in some combination)?
Which replicate it all (visible in search engines if you construct a search matching the page)?
Which replicate none and must be searched directly (totally invisible)?
You often don't know if a page has a ? in its URL until after you've somehow found it (excluded by policy).
Search engines can change their policies on what the exclude and include.


Excerpt from:

Barker, Joe.  Invisible Web: What it is, Why it exists, How to find it, and Its inherent ambiguity.  Finding Information on the Internet: A Tutorial.  28 August 2003.  UC Berkeley - Teaching Library Internet Workshops.  17 Nov 2003.  http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/TeachingLib/Guides/Internet/InivisibleWeb.html

Posted by iachan on Monday, 17 November 2003 @ 9:57 PM