The Invisible Web Weblog

According to the result of a recent study carried out by Antonio Gulli and Alessio Signorini the size of the indexable web is estimated to be more than 11.5 billion pages. They reported this result at the special interest tracks and posters of the 14th international conference on World Wide Web in Chiba, Japan, May 2005. The full document is available here .

Just a link to the " The World Summit on the Information Society ". It is good to visit this website at least in the last day of the conference.

There are many methods to rank universities around the world. One of the new methods is looking at their websites to measure the patterns of the hyperlinks to and from them. This new idea of ranking which seems quite reasonable to me comes from Webometrics. I’ll write about the Webometrics later on and for now just invite you to have a look at the ranking here . The website introduces the whole idea of their ranking system as follow: “The ranking is based on a combined indicator that takes into consideration the volume of the published material on the web, and the visibility and impact of these webpages measured by the sitations (site citations) or links they received (inlinks). It is derived from the Web Impact Factor , build on the same idea as the bibliographic databases based Impact Factor of the Journal Citation Reports published by the Institute of Scientific Information, now Thomson Scientific .”

This is just a quick link to a meta-search engine called ProFusion powered by Intelliseek company. ProFusion provides its users with deeper search realm over the web. I’ll write more about this search tools later on because this is one the search facilities related to the invisible web and interestingly when you search the invisible web term in Google, ProFusion is one of the first retrieved items. Actually, I should write about it much earlier, but I don’t know for whatever reason I put it off. Anyway, I have further details about ProFusion but I would like you visit it first and if you like try its search ability , then I’ll write my ideas.

Broken links, dead links or Linkrot are those URLs which are not available anymore and lead to nowhere. This problem might happen for many reasons. For example, they probably have moved form their original place or have been replaced by new information. This can be a very important issue for everybody who uses the web. In fact, broken links are one of the major parts of the opaque web as well. If you have a favourite links collection on your own web browser you probably have already noticed that how quickly these links getting out of date and you need to keep your list up-to-date constantly.

Librarians and information professionals are responsible for classification of information resources and enhancing the level of information accessibility for end users. Regardless the type and format of the resources dissemination of information and making link between users and their information needs are major concerns of people who work as librarians or information experts. Web facilities provide them to play their important role in new format and of course with new perspectives and more effectiveness. As I have already mentioned it, developing subject gateways, portals and any other type of web-based access sources are very helpful in reducing the level of invisibility of information on the Web. Here is a website which shows a successful example of librarians’ role in the electronic environment. Topsy N. Smalley a librarian at Cabrillo College in California who has developed a website acting as a useful gateway of information to many information resources is a good example of the l...