Keyword Search, Plus a Little Magic

From Lingua Franca 
Google relies on at least four facts, all of them crucial, but especially the fourth one.

1. Computer memory chips have become so cheap and so tiny that in an office-sized space you can pack enough random-access-memory units to store an utterly gigantic automatically maintained concordance to the whole Web, augmented with copies of huge portions of what is on those sites.
2. Networks and processors have become so fast that your search command can be delivered to a server far away and checked against the gigantic index in just hundredths of a second.
3. The number of sites containing all of the words on a list (rather than just some of them) goes down rapidly with the length of the list, and much more rapidly when the words have low probabilities of occurrence.
4. Humans looking for a certain piece of information can on the whole be trusted to be smart enough to supply a list of words with the crucial property of having low probability in most texts but being guaranteed to occur in texts containing the desired information.

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Google

Google hasn't replaced libraries or many of the resources that we provide, but it has changed the way that our users think about us and interact with us, and the ways in which we now respond to our environment and the work that we do on a daily basis. But we're still here and the lights are still on. We just need to learn to stop worrying and let go, let Google.

How deep does Google go?

From the Chronicle of HE:

Does Google's Web Search Go Deep Enough Into Scholarly
Archives?
http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/article/?id=3205&utm_source=at&utm
_medium=en

"Many scholarly archives on college and public Web sites don’t show up in Google because the search engine doesn’t index them — they’re in what many call the “deep Web,” below the level that most search engines look. A new study found that fewer than half — just 44 percent — of a sample group of deep-Web pages from scholarly archives showed up in Google searches."

Comments on a study http://www.dlib.org/dlib/july08/hagedorn/07hagedorn.html done by digital librarians at the University of Michigan who are also involved in the Open Archives Initiative, an effort to help search engines find items deep in Web archives.