Lest my blog yesterday recounting my less than satisfactory interaction with Cuil be seen as a pro-Google bias, today I read an article in The Wired Campus entitled "Does Google’s Web Search Go Deep Enough into Scholarly Archives?" As someone who tries to teach students how to conduct research on-line, I was disappointed to read the article. Digital librarians at Michigan found that Google’s search doesn’t index most "deep-Web" pages, which is where most scholarly archives are located. The response from a Google official was less than encouraging.
- This year Google stopped supporting the Open Archive Initiative’s indexing standards. Google officials said in a blog post that fewer than 200 Web sites were using the standard, and that it was more trouble than it was worth to support it.
I encourage you to check out the Open Archives Initiative, which is an effort to help search engines find items deep in Web archives.
RSM
Ancient History Ramblings 