Computer · 2004 · 39 citations · 0 references
ComputingComputer ScienceInformation SystemsDatabasesInformation RetrievalWeb TechnologiesDatabase ManagementQuery ProcessingSearch SystemsSearch Engine CrawlingWeb CrawlingWeb Servers
The Web has become the primary platform for database‑driven applications, with dynamic sites generating pages from large databases that are largely inaccessible to traditional search engines, creating a vast “deep Web” of hidden information. The authors anticipate that advances in deep‑Web search engines will rapidly improve and significantly expand Web usability by providing easier access to these hidden resources.
The Web has become the preferred medium for many database applications, such as e-commerce and digital libraries. These applications store information in huge databases that users access, query, and update through the Web. Database-driven Web sites have their own interfaces and access forms for creating HTML pages on the fly. Web database technologies define the way that these forms can connect to and retrieve data from database servers. The number of database-driven Web sites is increasing exponentially, and each site is creating pages dynamically-pages that are hard for traditional search engines to reach. Such search engines crawl and index static HTML pages; they do not send queries to Web databases. The information hidden inside Web databases is called the "deep Web" in contrast to the "surface Web" that traditional search engines access easily. We expect deep Web search engines and technologies to improve rapidly and to dramatically affect how the Web is used by providing easy access to many more information resources.