Wright describes fascinating research that is being conducted, with the goal being access to all public databases. For some perspective, Wright begins this article thusly: "One day last summer, Google's search engine trundled quietly past a milestone. It added the one trillionth address to the list of web pages it knows about. But as impossibly big as that number may seem, it represents only a fraction of the entire Web."
Wright provides a primer on how search engines work when he declares that "[s]earch engines rely on programs known as crawlers (or spiders) that gather information by following the trails of hyperlinks that tie the Web together." Who knew? I certainly didn't.
Wright also provides information about two different projects that are probing the Deep Web. One is Kosmix www.kosmix.com. Another Deep Web effort is academic based. Led by Prof. Juliana Freie (that's her in the photograph) is called Deep Peep www.deeppeep.org. Both projects seek to create something called the "Semantic Web, the much-promoted - but so far unrealized - vision of a Web of interconnected data."
If you are interested in how technology shapes the way people access information, then this article will definitely interest you.
Photograph by Jeffrey D. Allread
for the New York Times
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