ERIC Number: ED459859
Record Type: Non-Journal
Publication Date: 2001-May
Pages: 22
Abstractor: N/A
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: N/A
EISSN: N/A
Finding Business Information on the "Invisible Web": Search Utilities vs. Conventional Search Engines.
Darrah, Brenda
Researchers for small businesses, which may have no access to expensive databases or market research reports, must often rely on information found on the Internet, which can be difficult to find. Although current conventional Internet search engines are now able to index over on billion documents, there are many more documents existing in databases that they are unable to reach. A recent study has estimated that the number of these "invisible web" documents may amount to 500 times the number of sites reached by conventional search engines. There are now search utilities that claim to be able to search many of the "invisible" documents. Capabilities in finding business information of the utilities Lexibot and BullsEye 2, as well as Google and metasearch engine Metacrawler, were compared in this study. Searches were conducted for 20 company names, as well as for forecasts, market share, and industry trends for two of these companies. Google was able to find the most relevant results. Because Lexibot and BullsEye 2 did not perform better than general search engines, it appears that it is still necessary to find information from the "invisible web" by first finding appropriate databases, then performing searches. Appendices include a list of companies researched, search terms, and search results data. (Contains 11 references.) (Author/MES)
Publication Type: Dissertations/Theses
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A