Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to report an empirical investigation into conceptions of the “invisible web”. Design/methodology/approach – This was an exploratory qualitative study based on in‐depth semi‐structured interviews with 15 members of academic staff from three...

Purpose – This paper aims to examine our current knowledge of how searchers perceive and react to the possibility of missing potentially important information whilst searching the web is limited. The study reported here seeks to investigate such perceptions and reactions, and to explore the...