Finding Invisible Web Resources
OR
How You Can Find the Invisible Web
Going back to the previous example of the avid fisherman going to Alaska, let's put ourselves back in the hypothetical situation of being a librarian at a reference desk. By now you know that most Invisible Web resources appear either in databases or can be found in indexes.
Knowing this, why not use them as keywords?
As Robert J. Lackie writes "[r]emember, the databases or searchable sites are not invisible to the search engines, only the information they contain" (67). Thus, if we are looking for the largest king salmon ever caught in Alaska, we can Google a phrase like "fishing database." (If you click on the Google hyperlink a new screen will appear and you can try this with me.)However, if you give this a try, you'll find that there are far too many results. Thus we do what any self-respecting searcher would do, modify our search phrase.
This time let's try: "fishing record database."
Likewise, the search results were far too nebulous for any use, but the first result does give us a clue that there are databases that chart the records of fishing catches in the past. So we modify our search and try again.
This time let's try: "fishing record database Alaska."
Success!!
This time we were able to connect to a page which provided us with the information to help the patron who sought out the details of the largest king salmon ever caught in Alaska through the Web site, alaskansportsman.com. And not only do we know how much it weighed, but where it was caught, the year it was caught, the location it was caught and who the angler was!
Another way to find Invisible Web resources is by using an index. What an index like The Librarians' Index to the Internet does is that a person like LII's creator, Carole Leita, searches the Web, finds Invisible Web pages, judges them on quality of content and then catalogues them if they are a quality source. In fact, the reason Leita created her index was in response to the disorganization of the internet's content in the early 90's (Price 70).
Through using both the "database" keyword search method and indexes which review Web pages for quality content, one should be able to amass a small collection of useful Invisible Web resources to aid them in future searches.
