Going Beyond Google: The Invisible Web in Learning and Teaching

Citation

Dawson, A. (2010), "Going Beyond Google: The Invisible Web in Learning and Teaching", Library Review, Vol. 59 No. 6, pp. 471-472. https://doi.org/10.1108/00242531011055768

In many ways this is a good book: good title, good size, good cover and, most importantly, a good concept with a clear focus; describing web content that is said to be “invisible” to search engines and showing how to find it. The content is not bad either, but I do have a few quibbles:

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  Many of the sites quoted are not invisible at all. They are directories, such as Infomine and BUBL that are indexed by Google. These are distinctive, selective and useful sites that provide browsing by subject (something that search engines are generally poor at), but they have a very small scope. The book is right to highlight their value, but they are not part of the invisible web.

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  The authors acknowledge that the gap between the visible and invisible web is narrowing. Yet, they persist with the notion that students and researchers should learn about all the invisible resources, while not pressing for a more valuable outcome, which would be for more content providers to make more of their content visible. It's not that hard to do, and does not mean that everything has to be free.

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  It overlooks another serious problem, which is the poverty of the Google search options, which are far inferior to those of eBay or a decent library catalogue. This is not really Google's fault, as it is difficult (largely impossible) to offer a well‐structured field‐based search of unstructured information. But Google Scholar shows the way.

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  It's not true that web crawlers can not retrieve from databases, because many databases export content in search‐engine‐friendly format, and also Google is getting better at indexing databases directly and in gaining co‐operation from content providers to enable this.

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  There is little doubt that students and researchers could get better results from Google if they used it more intelligently. That might be easier to achieve than weaning them away from Google. But the fact is that for most tasks students don't need to retrieve everything, they just need to retrieve enough. And Google is very good for that.

It is certainly the case that the invisible web is largely free from the contamination by spammers, advertisers and trivial comment that can make the visible web so irritating. Google does its best but is constantly fighting against content pollution.

Overall the book is worthwhile and valuable, but it does seem to have a specific angle to push, and in doing so it does not provide a balanced account of what is admittedly a fluid topic to cover. In fact, since the book was published, Google has announced a major change by providing personalised search results by default, even if users are not signed in and have not opted for personalisation. This change could have a significant, and not necessarily positive, effect on the nature of search results. So there will be plenty of scope for a second edition to incorporate this and other developments.