Tonight at SDForum’s SearchSIG, Kosmix Co-Founder Dr. Anand Rajaraman and Dr. Alon Halevy of Google Labs will debate two very different approaches to the Deep Web.

The Deep Web is the portion of the Internet not accessible to traditional search engines.  Social networks, media-sharing sites for photos and videos, library catalogs, airline reservation systems, phone books, and all kinds of scientific databases lurk inside the Web, practically invisible today’s search tools.

The volume of this hidden content is enormous: some estimates have pegged the size of the Deep Web at up to 500 times larger than the slice of the Web we see on search engines today.

Ironically, the Deep Web hides some of the richest content on the Internet. The Web 2.0 revolution has enabled an explosion of sites dedicated to user-generated content, including Wikipedia, YouTube, Flickr, TripAdvisor and Yelp. Content on these sites grows so rapidly that it’s nearly impossible for Web crawlers to keep up. Social media sites like Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter pose the same challenge, and often add privacy protections that permit only “friends” to view certain information.

Anand and Alon are among the world’s leading experts in the field of the Deep Web, and their two companies take very different approaches to mining this data.  In this session, Alon and Anand will examine how the Deep Web will change the business of Search, offer insight into what content creators should expect as the Deep Web becomes more accessible, and comment on what this shift might mean for the end user. They will also address the question of whether the Deep Web will someday be fully exposed, and if not, why not.

Agenda:
6:30-7:00pm – Registration / Food & Drink
7:00–7:05pm – A few words about the Search SIG
7:00-9:00 pm – Program

Price
$15 at the door for non-SDForum members
No charge for SDForum members

Date:  Tonight! November 12, 2009

Location: