Got a research paper or thesis to write for school Want to research using the Internet? Good luck. There’s a lot of junk out there — outdated pages, broken links, and inaccurate information. Using Google or the Wikipedia may lead you to some results, but you can rarely be sure of accuracy. And what’s more, you’ll only be searching a fraction of all of the resources available to you.
Google, the largest search database on the planet, currently has around eight billion web pages indexed. That’s a lot of information. But it’s nothing compared to what else is out there. Google can only index the visible web, or searchable web. But the invisible web, or deep web, is estimated to be 500 times bigger than the searchable web. The invisible web comprises databases and results of specialty search engines that the popular search engines simply are not able to index.
Do you think your local or university librarian uses Google? Sure, but certainly not exclusively. In order to start researching like a librarian, you’ll need to explore more authoritative resources, many of which are invisible. Note: Although some of the following resources are visible and indexed, they have all been included here because of their authoritative nature.
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Topics Covered in this Article
Deep Web Search Engines | Art | Books Online | Business | Consumer | Economic and Job Data | Finance and Investing | General Research | Government Data | International | Law and Politics | Library of Congress | Medical and Health | Science | Transportation
Deep Web Search Engines
To get started, try using a search engine that specializes in scouring the invisible web for results. None of these can search the entire invisible web, but they make some inroads that Google has not as of yet.
- Clusty — A metasearch engine that combines the results of several top search engines.
- Intute — A searchable database of trusted sites, reviewed and monitored by subject specialists.
- INFOMINE — A virtual library of Internet resources relevant to university students and faculty. Built by librarians from the University of California, California State University, the University of Detroit-Mercy, and Wake Forest University.
- Librarians’ Internet Index — A search engine listing sites deemed trustworthy by actual human librarians, not just a Googlebot.
- Internet Archive — A database of tens of thousands of movies, live music, audio, texts, and home of the Wayback Machine that allows you to find old versions of web pages, over 55 billion.
- direct search — A list of hundreds of specialty databases and search engines. No longer maintained, but still perhaps the most complete list of the deep web.
Art
Hundreds of other museums all over the world have their own databases. This is just a list of the databases for a few of the most popular. Within these databases are descriptions of the work, its location, and an image of the work.