November 10, 2007
Complete Planet
Complete Planet is a search engine that attempts to make the "Deep Web" more accessible. You may ask why can't I just use Google or Yahoo to find these deep spots in the web. Well the reason that the Deep Web doesn't appear in normal search results is because the computer web crawlers (that Google and other search engines use to find information) can't crawl through every item on a sites database.
For instance when you go to a site that has a searchable database of items, you design a query and search for items. But if you change one word, you get different results. In fact there are thousands of different queries that you could type, each returning different results. The web crawlers can't possibly check every query on every site, so there is tons of data not being indexed by web crawlers. These sites are the Deep Web--which is actually larger than the visible web.
As I was saying before, Complete Planet attempts to make the Deep Web more accessible by providing a place to search for databases. For my purposes, I searched Complete Planet in three different ways: normal query, advanced query, and browsing with a query.
Normal Query
The first thing I did when I arrived at Complete Planet was type in my query [Health Benefits Organic Food], but this didn't return any results. I tried making the search as unspecific as possible, but when I just had [organic health] the results where not relevant. I also tried to use boolean search syntax, however, this also returned zero results.
Advanced Query
Now I figured I should at least try the advanced search before I gave up on Complete Planet. The format was easy enough to understand, but again my search didn't return any results.
Browsing with a Query
Finally (when I was almost going to write Complete Planet off as a bad site), I tried browsing through Complete Planet's indexed databases. I first clicked on Health, and then nutrition. Once I was in the nutrition tree (tree is the term Complete Planet uses to describe a category) I searched within that tree for [Organic]. This returned some relevant results. I then went back to the home page and tried browsing and searching different trees and eventually found the following three databases:
So even though it took a bit of work, I was able to find great databases full of useful and relevant organic information that I would have never found if I had not taken the time to search the deep web with Complete Planet.
Posted by joezat at November 10, 2007 01:08 PM