Invisible web

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Invisible Web The Deep Web (also called Deepnet, DarkNet, Undernet, or the hidden Web) refers to World Wide Web content that is not part of the Surface Web, which is indexed by standard search engines.

Mike Bergman, credited with coining the phrase, has 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.

Deep resources

Deep Web resources may be classified into one or more of the following categories:

• Dynamic content: dynamic pages which are returned in response to a submitted query or accessed only through a form, especially if open-domain input elements (such as text fields) are used; such fields are hard to navigate without domain knowledge.

• Unlinked content: pages which are not linked to by other pages, which may prevent Web crawling programs from accessing the content. This content is referred to as pages without backlinks (or inlinks).

• Private Web: sites that require registration and login (password-protected resources).

• Contextual Web: pages with content varying for different access contexts (e.g., ranges of client IP addresses or previous navigation sequence).

• Limited access content: sites that limit access to their pages in a technical way (e.g., using the Robots Exclusion Standard, CAPTCHAs, or no-cache Pragma HTTP headers, which prohibit search engines from browsing them and creating cached copies.

• Scripted content: pages that are only accessible through links produced by JavaScript as well as content dynamically downloaded from Web servers via Macromedia Flash or Ajax solutions.

• Non-HTML/text content: textual content encoded in multimedia (image or video) files or specific file formats not handled by search engines.

• Text content using the Gopher protocol and files hosted on the FTP protocol that is not indexed by most search engines. Engines such as Google do not index pages outside of the HTTP protocol.