Search engines are currently the standard medium for locating and accessing information on the Web. However, they may not scale to match the anticipated explosion of Web content since they support only extremely coarse-grained queries and are based on centralized architectures. In this paper, we discuss how database technology can be successfully utilized to address the above problems. We also present the main features of a prototype Web database system called DIASPORA that we have developed and tested on our campus network. This system supports fine-grained querying and implements a distributed processing architecture.