Monday - July 31, 2000

Digital Divide Runs Deepest in the South

Just as minority composition and economic conditions differ from state to state, so too does the width of the digital divide. According to a new Technographics® Brief from Forrester Research, Inc, efforts to bring Hispanic- and African-Americans online should focus on Southern states where they fall furthest behind.

Three categories of states emerge when the width of the digital divide between Caucasians and the largest ethnic minority in each state is examined. The Deeply Divided category consists of 16 states where Internet adoption by the state's largest minorities -- Hispanic- and African-Americans -- trails Caucasians by a wider margin than the US average. Texas, Tennessee, and California are among the most divided.

The Divided category consists of 14 states that cluster around the US average for online penetration. When compared with Caucasians, African- and Hispanic-Americans fare best in the Narrowly Divided group of nine states, which includes Ohio, Washington, and New Jersey.

Forrester's survey reveals that the digital divide is not driven by ethnicity but by disparities in each group's income, age, technology optimism, and education -- the same drivers that separate the three categories of states. Seven out of the 10 states with the lowest median incomes for African-Americans are Deeply Divided. Young consumers' higher technology optimism makes them likelier early adopters, giving Hispanic- and Asian-Americans an edge. In Deeply Divided Southern states, Caucasians are 19% more likely than African-Americans and 32% more likely than Hispanic-Americans to have graduated from college.

Jay Stanley, analyst in Internet Policy & Regulation research at Forrester is announcing findings from this Brief as they apply to Florida at a press conference and luncheon today with Gov. Jeb Bush in Tallahassee. Gov. Bush will announce a new statewide technology access initiative called PowerUp, a partnership designed to give underserved youth access to technology and guidance on how to use it.

"Florida is one of the states in which the digital divide is most pervasive among African-Americans, with only 26% online," said Stanley. "Legislators should fund alternatives to home access -- making the Internet available in schools, libraries, and workplaces of all types."

Forrester's Technographics 2000 Benchmark Study of more than 80,000 US households exposed a digital divide -- the gap between the Internet haves and have nots -- in which Asian- and Hispanic-Americans lead other groups in technology adoption. Minorities in 11 states were not adequately represented in the Forrester survey.

Web 500 Times Bigger Than Thought
The World Wide Web just got 500 times larger. BrightPlanet, an Internet content company, has completed the first-ever study documenting the "deep" Web, a massive storehouse of databases and information that is unseen to existing search engines.

"Others have termed searchable databases the 'invisible Web,' a misnomer because the content is only 'invisible' to search engines, not to our direct-query search technology," Mike Bergman, BrightPlanet's Chairman said. "But frankly, what's been missed until now is the absolutely huge scale, importance and quality of information within the deep Web."

The BrightPlanet study estimates there are more than 100,000 content-rich searchable databases publicly available within the deep Web. Bergman said these sites collectively have information relevant to any need, citing as examples IBM's patent site, 10KWizard's database of SEC company filings, genome databases, the Costa Rica Supersite, genealogy records, historical sports statistics, NIH PubMed biomedical publications, and law cases and decisions.

Other findings from BrightPlanet's 41-pp white paper, The "Deep" Web: Surfacing Hidden Value are:

The reason the deep Web has been hidden in plain sight is today's reliance on search engines for content discovery on the Web. Existing search engines catalog the surface Web using spiders or crawlers that follow links on static Web pages, akin to ripples spreading across a pond.

The deep Web is made up of searchable databases, with results that are only served up dynamically in answer to a direct query. Though search engines may point to the doorways of these databases, they can not find or search the contents housed inside. Search engines can knock on the door but not get in.

BrightPlanet's technology uniquely and automatically identifies deep Web sites and retrieves their contents. The technology asks a direct query to information sources: 'Do you have what I want?', in a distinct language that the sources understand. BrightPlanet's direct-query technology searches multiple sources simultaneously and then uses proprietary computational linguistics techniques to automatically qualify and organize only the most relevant results.

Thane Paulsen, BrightPlanet's General Manager, likens traditional search engines to trawlers moving through the ocean, using coarse nets that are wide, but only reach a few feet deep. He contrasts BrightPlanet's technology to multiple fishing lines precisely guided by sonar to find, capture and pull up specific information from the deep and surface Web.

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