The Deep Web (also called the Deepnet, the Invisible Web, the Undernet or the hidden Web) is World Wide Web content that is not part of the Surface Web, which is indexed by standard search engines.
It should not be confused with the dark Internet, the computers that can no longer be reached via Internet, or with the distributed filesharing network Darknet, which could be classified as a smaller part of the Deep Web.
Mike Bergman, founder of BrightPlanet, credited with coining the phrase, said that searching on the Internet today can be compared to dragging a net across the surface of the ocean: a great deal may be caught in the net, but there is a wealth of information that is deep and therefore missed. Most of the Web's information is buried far down on dynamically generated sites, and standard search engines do not find it. Traditional search engines cannot "see" or retrieve content in the deep Web—those pages do not exist until they are created dynamically as the result of a specific search. The deep Web is several orders of magnitude larger than the surface Web.
Read more about Deep Web: Size, Naming, Deep Resources, Accessing, Crawling The Deep Web, Classifying Resources, Future
Famous quotes containing the words deep and/or web:
“Profundity often goes past the issue to some deep but useless truth.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“If our web be framed with rotten handles, when our loom is well nigh done, our work is new to begin. God send the weaver true prentices again, and let them be denizens.”
—Elizabeth I (1533–1603)