While all the recent buzz is on the New Web - the congruence of the mobile web, blogging, podcasting, new Media -, several different data points this week brought to mind the Deep Web. As the site says the "60 largest Deep Web sources contain 84 Billion pages of content. For comparison, Google (the largest Crawler-based search engine) indexes 4 - 6 Billion pages."
I was talking to a Gartner executive last week about the potential threat of blogging to their business model. If you buy in to the fact that Google and other search engines are becoming the de facto search interface for even corporate users, the likely search results on technology topics show blogger opinions first, then those from industry media, finally some publicly released industry analyst results. If eyeballs are important, the analyst firms are losing that battle.
Then I saw this Business 2.0 list of "technologies that change everything" - and "Deep Web search" is one of them. It lists Google, IBM and Yahoo and a few specialist vendors as those to watch in the category. Oracle and Microsoft are noticeably absent.
Finally, major book publishers sued Google this week for its attempts to digitize copyrighted materials - Google's attempt to make the Deep web a little "shallower".
I imagine the battles to digitize proprietary and other "deep" content and to optimize every growing search/database access is going to be just as fascinating to watch as the New Web evolution.
