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:
“I think of the nestling fallen into the deep grass,
The turtle gasping in the dusty rubble of the highway,
The paralytic stunned in the tub, and the water rising,—
All things innocent, hapless, forsaken.”
—Theodore Roethke (1908–1963)
“However, our fates at least are social. Our courses do not diverge; but as the web of destiny is woven it is fulled, and we are cast more and more into the centre. Men naturally, though feebly, seek this alliance, and their actions faintly foretell it.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)