Search engines may eventually be used to conduct polling and even help sort fact from fiction, said Meng, who is helping to make such possibilities a reality, both through his research and as president of a company called Webscalers.

The way Meng sees it, big search engines such as Google and Yahoo are fundamentally flawed. The Web has two parts: the surface Web and the deep Web. The surface Web is made up of perhaps 60 billion pages. The deep Web, at some 900 billion pages, is about 15 times larger.

Google, which relies on a "crawler" to examine pages and catalog them for future searches, can search about 20 billion pages. Web crawlers follow links to reach pages and often miss content that isn't linked to any other page or is in some way "hidden."

Meng, along with researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago and the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, has helped pioneer large-scale metasearch-engine technology that harnesses the power of small search engines to come up with results that are more accurate and more complete.


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