The Surface Web (also called the Visible Web, Indexed Web, Indexable Web or Lightnet) is the portion of the
World Wide Web
The World Wide Web (WWW or simply the Web) is an information system that enables Content (media), content sharing over the Internet through user-friendly ways meant to appeal to users beyond Information technology, IT specialists and hobbyis ...
that is readily available to the general public and searchable with standard
web search engine
A search engine is a software system that provides hyperlinks to web pages, and other relevant information on World Wide Web, the Web in response to a user's web query, query. The user enters a query in a web browser or a mobile app, and the sea ...
s. It is the opposite of the
deep web
The deep web, invisible web, or hidden web are parts of the World Wide Web whose contents are not indexed by standard web search-engine programs. This is in contrast to the " surface web", which is accessible to anyone using the Internet. Co ...
, the part of the web not indexed by a
web search engine
A search engine is a software system that provides hyperlinks to web pages, and other relevant information on World Wide Web, the Web in response to a user's web query, query. The user enters a query in a web browser or a mobile app, and the sea ...
. The Surface Web only consists of 10 percent of the information that is on the internet. The Surface Web is made with a collection of public web pages on a server accessible by any search engine.
According to one source, , Google's Index of the Surface Web contains about 14.8 billion pages.
See also
*
Clearnet (networking)
Clearnet is a term that typically refers to the publicly accessible Internet. Sometimes "clearnet" is used as a synonym for " surface web"—excluding both the darknet and the deep web. The World Wide Web is one of the most popular distributed ...
References
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Internet search engines
Internet terminology
Dark web