Advocate's Studio

I was asked earlier today to find something that Google couldn’t find, at least for free anyway. So what did I do? I did the deep dive, of course.

I haven’t touched on this topic recently here in the Studio, so the time is ripe. I am talking about the “deep web”, the “invisible web” of data and documents hosted on the Internet that traditional search bots and crawlers of Google and similar ilk can’t seem to index. It is estimated that the invisible web is 500 times larger than the searchable portion of the Web, which we all know is pretty freaking big to begin with. Sometimes, you won’t be able to find what you are looking for using traditional search engines, so what do you do? You use some tricks to access those hidden databases, of course – you are more than 500 times more likely to find the goods.

If you are looking for a search engine tuned to deep web searching, check out this great list (over 100!) broken down by topic, curated by the Online Education Database.

If you are looking for information that is more geared towards the legal profession, you can do no better than this great list of invisible web resources over at LLRX curated by Marcus Zillman.

Wondering what I was looking for? A current list of legislation across the 50 states pertaining to medical malpractice, particularly tort damages caps. I found it in a database maintained by the National Association of State Legislatures. I didn’t have to pay a cent for it. Thanks guys! Sorry Westlaw.

There is a lot to like about Google, yet there is also a lot to dislike too. An inherent distrust of results on first glance is one of my personal pet peeves. One never know if the top site on Google contains a scholarly answer to your question or is simply the result of cleverly crafted SEO.

Blekko (link here) is an upstart engine that hopes to address some of those woes. Blekko, which is publicly available as of today, trolls three billion Web pages it deems worthy and shows the very best results on any given topic. These “curated” pages are known in Blekko-ese by the somewhat unfortunate name of “slashtags.”

Blekko’s creators know enough to weed out pages that are churned out by companies on topics the company deems popular by people who may not fit your particular definition of “scholarly.” Blekko also leverages vertical search engines on specific topics – a better way to gain depth in results.

Do you like the look of Bing with its photo backgrounds? I do, but I don’t like to be tied to a Bing search.

You can file favitt.com under “visually appealing” first and “productivity and efficiency” tools second, but I found it cool nonetheless. Favitt is essentially a Google custom search page on which you can apply your own skin or photo background, and toggle between different search engines. Choices include Google, Images, Bing, YouTube, News, Amazon, Wikipedia, Twitter, Digg, Last.fm, Yelp, Answers, and Maps. Favitt also allows you to add links on the search page to your favorite sites including FAcebook, MySpace, Twitter, Gmail, Yahoo Mail, and Hot Mail.

It is efficient in the sense that it offers you the ability to toggle between a variety of popular search tools and use quick links for favorite sites. And looking nice while doing it. Favitt promises that new features are coming. We shall see.

Check out my Favitt page here (link here).

Related articles by Zemanta

• Favitt Gives You A Customized Search Engine, Which Google, Yahoo and Bing Cant (mt-soft.com.ar)
• Favitt Lets You Look for Anything Online (johnchow.com)
• Houston’s Favitt dresses up Google’s search page (blogs.chron.com)

Want a comprehensive search but don’t have the time to hit all the major engines? Check out Heapr (link here). Heapr will show results from Google, Twitter, Wikipedia, WolframAlpha, Flickr, and more. It’s cool and its really fast – it starts searching as you type and only loads one page at a time. Images will show you both Google images and Flickr images. Videos show results from YouTube, Vimeo and Hulu on the same page. You can download YouTube vids with a single click. The lite version of Heapr just hits up Google but does it much faster than Google itself!

Heapr offers a browser plug-in so you can access Heapr’s search from the little browser box in your bar. Go ahead and check it out – bet you will be as impressed as I was.

I got the screen below in response to my “tweetie purchase” search in about 2 seconds. Wow. Oh, and for you ad-phobes, there are no ads. Really. It also looks like there are some features in the pipe-line, including customizable layouts, color themes, widgets and speed enhancements. A service to watch, for sure.

Related articles by Zemanta

• How To Create Custom Search Engines In Google Chrome (best-tutorial.net)
• 10 Websites That Make Browsing Wikipedia More Fun (makeuseof.com)
• Wolfram|Alpha Knows Your DNA (scienceroll.com)

With new content consumption devices popping up faster than you can spell “i-P-a-d”, you surely will need some content to consume. How about a search engine for PDFs and eBooks. Live PDF (link here) lets you query Google or Bing (although not at the same time) via a single search interface for PDFs and eBooks on any topic. Your results will take you straight to the downloadable content, where you can whisk it from the ether into your internet-enabled reading device.

There are no filters, categories, sorting options or any other form of data / search manipulation tools on the page, but you can view the last 10 searches! Here is to hoping that one of the previous ten visitors was looking up stuff on the semantic Web!

Thanks, MakeUseOf!