Using a Google search to find information to solve an engineering or scientific problem has pitfalls. You may be evaluating the quality of the sources you are using (see last blog entry: “Look before you Leap”), but you may not be finding information that is complete enough. Even worse, you may believe you have the information you need, but are missing crucial points.
A great majority of the information freely available on the Internet is not found through Google, or even a combination of search engines. This unfound information includes a lot of information from databases and is known as the “invisible web”, or “deep web”. Much has been written about the invisible web, the techniques to use to find this information, and also the challenging efforts of search engines to try to search it (see Exploring a Deep Web that Google Can’t Grasp, and Deep Web Research 2009.)
Besides hard-to-find Internet information, there is other valuable information that is not available at all on the free Internet. It may require access to commercial systems or may not even be available in digital form (ie. paper journals).
Consider the following situations where a comprehensive search can be critical, and where a Google search alone would not be good enough:
- A manufacturing engineer needs a complete overview of potential solutions to solve an obscure problem in his process.
- A forensic scientist needs peer-reviewed articles acceptable to a judge in a Daubert hearing.
- A geotechnical engineer needs to find geologic studies conducted within a narrow geographical area – some of which could be from early in the 20th century.
- An R&D scientist for a manufacturing company needs market intelligence about a new market area being considered . What products are currently on the market? What is the structure of the industry? What companies are selling this product?
Use of a professional researcher with knowledge of the range and type of potential sources for this information can avoid the loss of time, money or a legal case.
