The Hidden Web: Finding Quality Information on the Net

Citation

MacDonald, R. (2008), "The Hidden Web: Finding Quality Information on the Net", The Electronic Library, Vol. 26 No. 5, pp. 762-763. https://doi.org/10.1108/02640470810910800

The “hidden Web” of the title refers to the useful and trustworthy online needles that can be lost amongst the online haystack. What makes The Hidden Web particularly useful is the author's top‐down approach to finding the good stuff, rather than simply describing the resources that exist within particular subject areas. Thus, while plenty of subject‐specific web sites are mentioned, the bulk of the book is about the kinds of resources that exist for organising and/or discovering web‐based information, and how to find and use them, regardless of topic.

Maureen Henninger has worked extensively in the electronic information environment with a strong focus on the art of online searching. She covers a lot of ground here, beginning with a brief review of the development of the web and basic web technologies. Different approaches to indexing, classification, and metadata schemes are described, together with examples of their application to web resources, such as the use of DDC by the BUBL subject directory. She then describes different searching behaviours on the Web and what tools are best suited to these:, e.g. if you are “just browsing” try starting with a directory or subject gateway, or if you need a particular fact, try a reference database. The following chapters examine different types of information‐finding tools (directories, portals, vortals, and gateways), before an explanation of the basics of digital searching (Boolean operators, etc.) leads into a long chapter on search engines, how they actually work, and the use of specialised search engines.

Evaluation of online material is succinctly covered in a section on authoritative information; this includes a comparison of the automated excerpts that search engines produce and the abstracts produced by humans: the discussion of the evaluation and annotation of online resources nicely explains the value of services such as the Librarians' Internet Index. Further chapters discuss intellectual property (rather briefly), digital libraries (emphasising their use of metadata), and the invisible web (defined by the author as publicly accessible pages not visible to search engines, and typically including dynamic content, grey literature, etc.), and how to find things with Web 2.0 applications (e.g. how to identify experts from discussion groups). The last three chapters are specifically devoted to discovering medical, business, or educational material, showing how a range of tools and techniques can be used. Several chapters include exercises illustrating the use of the resources described, and answers are provided at the end of the book.

Currency is an unavoidable problem when using a static book to describe the mutable web: Henninger's discussion of Web 2.0 mentions MySpace only briefly, while Facebook does not get a look‐in. Similarly, although The Hidden Web is heavily illustrated with screenshots showing the actual use of the resources described, a number are simply out of date. A separate problem is that many of these illustrations could have used some annotation to indicate exactly what the reader should be seeing. However, these are minor issues in an otherwise packed and informative book of use to anyone who wants information from the haystack we call the web.