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:
“The harlot squatted
with her hands over her red hair.
She was not looking for customers.
She was in a deep fear.”
—Anne Sexton (1928–1974)
“Being so wrong about her makes me wonder now how often I am utterly wrong about myself. And how wrong she might have been about her mother, how wrong he might have been about his father, how much of family life is a vast web of misunderstandings, a tinted and touched-up family portrait, an accurate representation of fact that leaves out only the essential truth.”
—Anna Quindlen (b. 1952)