In a previous HRTools.com Insight, I introduced readers to the reality of the Internet’s unchartered frontier, which is also known as the ‘Deep Web.’ This vast amount of unexplored information is useless unless people are aware of it and know how to tap into it, or mine it. This Insight continues a series on this topic.
Similar to oceanic oil reservoirs—just having oil available at the depths of the Gulf of Mexico, for example, is not beneficial to anyone. In order to explore, drill and produce oil and natural gas, international oil companies must rely on the coordination of a variety of people: ranging from researchers to scientists and countless others who possess highly technical skills and deep sea technology expertise.
Get ready for a treasure hunt, because your present and future customers are e-searching.
So much like those oil reservoirs, the Internet’s far reaches of the Deep Web present attractive and potentially valuable mining possibilities. And companies that learn how to coordinate efforts in mining this knowledge can gain significant advantages; for example, increased and heightened customer experiences.
Technically speaking, when we talk about the Deep Web, we are referencing those pages that may not have been classified as data. This information may not have been included in the search, or it was not, for example, listed by the Internet. For instance, someone may have created a blog and they never promoted it; perhaps, instead, it was made available as an RSS feed between companies. The point is there is a wealth of information out there that is mostly unexplored and untapped.
Where can you start looking for this invisible content?
The following sites are designed to help users search for and find otherwise ‘invisible content,’ or content contained in databases, as compared to using other popular search engines:
- Google Scholar is an excellent example. This search engine tool from Google is separate from its main search engine, and has its own URL (http://scholar.google.com).
- Another example is INFOMINE, the virtual library of Internet resources, which is found at http://infomine.ucr.edu. INFOMINE contains over 100,000 links and access to hundreds of databases.
When you consider all the company databases out there, at the same time you have to think and talk about: “How do we share our databases? How do we link them up?”
Meanwhile, how can a business start figuring all this out? Here are a few steps that may give you a head-start:
- Begin by simply conducting some searches.
- Start to compare results. For example, look for language databases. See what you get versus just searching Google for languages.
- Then conduct a search under the Deep Web or the hidden Web; you will find vendors who have developed search boxes—those little search engines—that look for scripting language in Web pages designed to keep others from accessing them. This content may have some code in it, say a question mark that makes it difficult for a search engine to detect, and this is done for identification purposes; then the software can often extract the content from those pages.
So by taking the above steps, you can get a good start.
Coming up number one on the Google search rankings is decreasing in relevance.
Eventually, if not already, as user awareness and technologies evolve (about the World Wide Web), it is growing increasingly irrelevant for an e-retailer to say, “Hey, I’ve got ‘x’ number of hits on my Web site, or I popped up first on the search engine position rankings.” This occurrence is becoming meaningless. What’s more important for that e-retailer to know is: What are these people searching for?
If the right questions are not asked or the right search phrases are not sought, the best results will not be found. It’s like anything else in the competitive business world: those who are first in the race for knowledge gain a competitive advantage. In order to do that, particularly with Internet consumers, you must first become aware that vast amounts of Deep Web knowledge are out there. Now is a good time to start learning, because many Web users are unaware that this information even exists.
In upcoming Insights, I will continue reviewing the Deep Web and related issues, such as searching patterns, and how this seemingly invisible information that is out there ‘below the surface’ can be found.