Deep Peep
March 7, 2009
A happy quack to the reader who sent me a link to the Deep Peep beta. You can try the beta of the deep Web search engine here. The site said here:
DeepPeep is a search engine specialized in Web forms. The current beta version tracks 13,000 forms across 7 domains. DeepPeep helps you discover the entry points to content in Deep Web (aka Hidden Web) sites, including online databases and Web services. This search engine is designed to cater to the needs of casual Web users in search of online databases (e.g., to search for forms related to used cars), as well as expert users whose goal is to build applications that access hidden-Web information (e.g., to obtain forms in job domain that contain salary, or discover common attribute names in a domain). The development of DeepPeep has been funded by National Science Foundation award #0713637 III-COR: Discovering and Organizing Hidden-Web Sources.
Deep Web is one of those buzz words that waxes and wanes. For many years Bright Planet and Deep Web Technologies have been the systems I associated with indexing content behind passwords and user names. I wrote a report about Google’s programmable search engine in 2007. The PSE contains some “deep Web” functionality, but the GOOG exposes only a fraction of its “deep Web” capabilities to the adoring millions who use the Google search system. An example of a typical “deep Web” data set might be the flight information and prices available at an airline site or the information available to a registered user of an online service. Dealing with “deep Web” issues is a lot of work. Manual fixes to spider scripts are expensive and time consuming. The better “deep Web” systems employ sophisticated methods that eliminate most of the human fiddling required to navigate certain services.
Today quite a few systems have “deep Web” capability but don’t use that phrase to describe their systems. Here’s a screen shot from my test query for “search”. I used the single word “search” because the word pair “enterprise search” returned results that were not useful to me.
Give the new system a spin and share your opinions in the comments section of this Web log.
Stephen Arnold, March 7, 2009
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