Deep Web Search: Are Your Forms Crawlable?

Writing by Nick Stamoulis Tweet

A recent disagreement between Om Malik and Matt Cutts over Google’s innovativeness led to a discussion on deep web crawl. In the end, Om ate some crow (but he didn’t eat the whole crow).

I’d say that deep web crawl is a big idea. In the past, Google’s spiders could not crawl forms. But this .PDF file indicates that lately Google has been doing just that on a limited basis.

I think there are broader implications, however. It won’t be long before Google announces that crawling forms is not only possible but common practice. When that happens I think the nature of forms will change. It is likely that they will become more dynamic. The news that Google is willing to crawl the forms and has demonstrated an ability to do so is itself news. And the search engine optimization implications are legion.