Go Beyond Search with Deep Web Engine BrightPlanet, Altsearchengines (Dec 7)
BrightPlanet is in the news again. Over 10 years ago it was doing deep indexing of databases and released papers on the Deep Web. The deep harvesting technology was showcased at its public site, CompletePlanet, but unfortunately the search interface was difficult to use, and it was unclear whether the indexing was fresh. I doubt that many used it.
But we might try again.
"BrightPlanet’s patented software harvests Deep Data from: (1) documents from the conventional (or surface) Web, (2) the much larger, more authoritative Deep Web, (3) proprietary data sources (such as LexisNexis and Dow Jones/Factiva), and (4) customers’ own internal data sources."
Today it serves the U.S. Intelligence Community with harvesting deep web content, and proposes to help businesses do the same.
BrightPlanet is a good starting point for learning about Deep Web. For example, the description of deep web in this video on The Virtual Private Library and Deep Web
I'm not convinced that CompletePlanet will be attractive to searchers. Firstly - the aim is to find the database rather than the particular page (as we do with Google), and secondly, it doesn't seem fresh. Harvested dates are March 05 - is that 2005, or March 5 in 2009? A query for social media (what could be hotter?) as a phrase finds two weak databases.
Posted by Gwen at December 8, 2009 04:28 PM