Searching the Web is easy. The difficult part is to find what you are looking for. While the search engines and mainly Google have done miracles in making millions of pages accessible, finding what you need when you need it is not always an easy task. And the truth is, that the ease with each Google has made it possible to retrieve most of the information we need, has made us lazy to search in depth, when the stuff we are looking for is not right at the top of the first ten search results.
Also, as my experience shows, the majority of users rely heavily on Google only – if something cannot be found via Google, then it simply does not exist, which is certainly not so. When Google cannot immediately retrieve a piece of information, most people just conclude that only what is retrieved exists and give up. I have often been in a similar situation – no matter how sophisticated queries I perform, I cannot find what I need but I am sure that it exists. Over the years I have developed a habit to keep an archive of important URLs and files that I stumble upon incidentally and that I might need some time in the future, but I am clever enough to know that even if I could make my personal mirror of the Net, this could hardly be more useful than Google.
Also, I am aware of the way search engines work and despite their revolutionary achievements, I do not expect them to be perfect. I know that even the most powerful search engines cannot index every single page on the Web and include them in their databases. And since search results display only information that is indexed and is in the search engine’s database, if my stuff is not indexed and is not included in the database, I stand no chance of finding it at all. I have already learned that search engines might be the easiest way to search the Web, but certainly they are not the only one. Besides, sometimes (for very specific searches) the major search engines just waste my and drown me in so much irrelevant information that I regret having to use them and resort to alternative means to make my way through the Invisible Web.