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Surfing the Internet Gets Deep

WorldWideScience provides a one-stop search engine to mine global scientific databases in the deep web

The internet has revolutionized society by changing the way people communicate, find information, and enjoy entertainment. But a standard internet search misses at least 90 percent of the information available. 

The internet is separated into two unequal pools of information. The surface web contains pages of information that are utilized by popular search engines. The second pool of information is locked away in the deep web, which consists of countless databases world wide.

According to Walt Warnick, Director of the DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI), "The deep web is huge."

Common browsers like Google and Yahoo crawl across the thousands of internet pages on the surface web, but are unable to dig into the databases to retrieve information from the deep web.

"Asking a scientist, engineer, or educator to find information in their field using common web browsers is like asking a doctor to diagnose disease without X-rays, MRI, or any other piece of diagnostic equipment" said Warnick.

Information in the deep web can only be mined for data using search engines designed for that particular database. Many of the search engines that are available to mine databases often do not use relevance ranking, making filtering through the information a crap shoot.

"Under the current system, finding information in the deep web is a series of practical impossibilities, placing internet users, especially scientists and science educators, at a severe disadvantage" said Warnick.

To address the global science need, OSTI has launched WorldWideScience.org, a science gateway that accelerates the search for data in national and international scientific databases and portals...

Related Topics: china, doe, osti, WorldWideScience.org (WWS)