The readings this week were informative and understandable. Search engines work incredibly well considering all the space that must be covered. And for many searches they seem to provide at least a kernel of the answer people are searching for. I had never really taken into consideration the need to break the tasks of search engines up nor realized how many hundreds of computers would be necessary to be able to search and store and answer and advertise. The use of hypertext to add to the Web knowledge of the search engine is such a great idea. In fact, it is how I find new classmates blogs to read, but I questioned what happens then to the information that is not linked? It doesn't get found.
The article on Deep Web touched on the drawbacks of search engines, the huge results with little relevance and particularly a lack of access to Web sites that are not connected to other sites. This web site, while plugging the particular search tool, explained that a significant amount of useful and relevant information is in the Deep Web, but is not accessed. The article listed Web sites that are considered to be Deep Web, mostly databases. The list made sense, but again I was struck by the fact that a searcher would have to be aware of the site to be able to access it. The article never made it clear how this particular search tool would make is possible to find these sites. But this brings up a interesting point: if the only way to use these sites it to know about them, where is the library's role in this?
The last article on OAI - Protocol for metadata harvesting nicely tied in last week's lecture with searching. A number of people were validly asking why we needed to know metadata or why it is important. I think when it comes to searching, metadata, while it may not be seen by human eye can be read by computers and helps to find sources while also keeping them in order.
11 years ago
