Week 12 Reading Notes

Web Search Engines, Part 1 & 2 [David Hawking]
- The fact that in 15 years the amount of data that must be indexed by search engines has grown by so much is astonishing. The quality of responses to query's that could have so many different meanings is astonishing.
- I don't think that most people understand what happens on the "inside" when they type something into the Google search bar. The algorithm that mines data is so cool!  I had no idea what happens in terms of excluded and duplicate content.
- For example, the way that I accessed the articles was done through  search engine. The links provided on courseweb didn't show the full text of the article, so I entered the author name and title of the article into a search bar to come up with the article text.

The Deep Web: Surfacing Hidden Value [Michael Bergman]

- I love the comparison of the web to the deep ocean. So much information is buried deeply and we don't know it exists. I also wonder if it matters that we don't know? Is it such specialized content that we don't need to know about it, or would all of our society benefit from mining the deep web?
- On the statistics - 550 billion documents in the deep web compared with the 1 billion of the surface web? What will we do with all of that information?
- "95 percent of the deep web is publicly accessible" - what can we do with this information? If, as the article suggests, it is of a higher quality, more niche, more specific, and not subject to restrictions, shouldn't we be using it more?
- Interesting to see what some of the most trafficked deep web sites are in terms of being freely accessible. Some, like JSTOR, i use frequently.
- This article is 10 years old. I wonder how much the statistics have changed since then?

Current Developments and Future Trends for the OAI Protocol for Metadata Harvesting
- This article was hard for me to understand because I know very little about the Open Archives Initiative.
-  Reading about the different initiatives, like the OLAC and the Sheet Music Consortium was interesting. I actually used the Sheet Music Consortium on a different project.
- Again, I am so impressed and interested in the work that these folks are doing. My brain does not work in a way that easily understands what these folks are doing and what they want to achieve. I am much more people oriented in my pursuit of librarianship. I'm glad that there are people who can pay attention to these parts of the bigger picture!