Many scholarly archives on college and public Web sites don’t show up in Google because the search engine doesn’t index them — they’re in what many call the “deep Web,” below the level that most search engines look. A new study found that fewer than half — just 44 percent — of a sample group of deep-Web pages from scholarly archives showed up in Google searches.
The study was done by digital librarians at the University of Michigan who are also involved in the Open Archives Initiative, an effort to help search engines find items deep in Web archives.
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.
But the Michigan study’s authors argue that their findings show that “Google needs to do much more to gather hidden resources, not less.” —Jeffrey R. Young
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