What lies beneath: harnessing the deep web

Type the word “Kauai” into your favorite search engine, and odds are you’ll get more than seven million results–a jumble of blue links to the Hawaiian tourism bureau, luxury hotels on Poipu beach and tour operators on the Napali coast. Think those results are the sum total of all the Web’s content on Kauai? Not even close.

Welcome to the Deep Web—the portion of the Web that is invisible to the search engine systems that crawl the Internet. Social networks, media-sharing sites for photos and videos, library catalogs, airline reservation systems, phone books and all kinds of scientific databases lie deep inside the Web. This hidden content is an estimated 500 times larger than the slice of the Web we see on Google or Yahoo.

As one of the world’s foremost experts in the Deep Web, Anand Rajaraman will outline the size and scope of the Deep Web, share new approaches for bringing the Deep Web to light, discuss the potential of Deep Web content to change the way we explore information online, and examine the privacy issues to anticipate as the Deep Web becomes more accessible.

Presenter(s)

Anand Rajaraman and Venky Harinarayan co-founded Kosmix in 2005 with the vision of connecting people to information that makes a difference in their lives.

In addition to being a co-founder of Kosmix, Anand Rajaraman is a founding partner of Cambrian Ventures. Venky and Anand also co-founded Junglee, the company that pioneered internet comparison shopping, in 1996. After Amazon's acquisition of Junglee in 1998 for $250 million, Anand helped create Amazon's marketplace business, which today accounts for over 30% of Amazon's gross merchandise sales.

Anand holds a bachelor's degree in Computer Science from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, and a PhD in Computer Science from Stanford University. On his blog Datawocky he discusses data mining techniques in search, social media, and advertising.