Searching, Grey Literature, and the Deep Web

This week we read about grey literature, searching the world wide web and about the deep (or invisible) web.  When I read the section on searching, my interest was piqued by the term “controlled vocabulary”.  For instance, is it an apartment, a condominium, or perhaps a flat?  I searched for controlled vocabulary and was interested to find that there are websites which will provide you with a controlled vocabulary.  For instance, http://www.controlledvocabulary.com/, will provide subscribers with a list of controlled vocabulary to tag their images with.  This obviously makes it easier for others to search for their images.  I would think that this list of controlled vocabulary would also make it easier for subscribers to search for relevant images.  It makes me wonder how long it will be before these lists are more widely used. 

Grey literature includes any documentary material which is not published.  While searching, I discovered Google Scholar which is “thought to provide increased access to gray literature, as it retrieves more than journal articles and includes preprint archives, conference proceedings, and institutional repositories” (Schultz).  I tried using Google Scholar for the first time and was amazed by how many articles it found.  Many of them were not full-text, but you could read the abstract and find what journal they were published in.  This would then allow you to use a periodical index to find the specific article.  I had never tried using Google Scholar and think that in certain situations it could be a valuable tool.

I also looked at an entry in Zillman’s blog, http://zillman.blogspot.com/2009/01/llrx-december-2008-issue-deep-web.html to read about the deep web.  I was amazed to read that we can usually only search 20 billion of the 1 trillion pages on the world wide web.  Overall, I think that this week has emphasized that we need to teach students that there is more than one way to search.   They need to learn that just using “Google” is often not enough.  It is important to use a variety of tools including databases in order to find the information we seek. 

Schultz, Mary . "Comparing Test Searches In PubMed and Google Scholar." Journal of the Medical Library Association 95.4 (2007): 442-445. National Center for Biotechnology Information. Web. 10 July 2011.