Did you know that the popular search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing search just 10 percent of the Internet? The other 90 percent is hidden from the eyes of the average user, but not inaccessible.
Over the years, Google, Bing and other search engines convinced users that through them they can find anything on the internet. But the truth is completely different. Search engines that most users use for daily searching is about 10 percent of the Internet. The other 90 percent that is harder to access is called the deep or ‘hidden’ web. These are large quantities of data, documents and web pages that simply are not indexed in commercial search engines, but that does not mean they do not exist.
Google’s robots so far indexed about 40 billion publicly accessible websites, and it is estimated that the world’s publicly published more than 100 billion pages. If we add more than 11 billion pages hidden from the public because they are intended only to specific users and more than 450 billion pages that are search result of large databases, which are completely hidden from the Google robot, it is clear how much a small part of the Internet Google actually browsing.
Invisible Internet is full of hidden data
But what is actually deep web? It is the content that is hidden from search engines because it is not stable. More precisely, it is a dynamic web pages that are created on the user’s request and as such do not exist while a user creates a query in a database.
Automatic robots that search engines use to index the Internet are simply not sufficiently developed not advanced enough to read and search private databases. Specifically, in addition to a database, the deep web are hidden and private networks, but the facilities are locked passwords.
To search that vast amounts of data are required specialized tools, special browsers or indicators that helps the user to discover a whole new world of data which is, according to estimates, at least 500 times greater than ‘visible’ web.
Once you start exploring this ‘invisible’ part, you can discover the pearls of various professional articles and collections, multimedia files, portals, directories, databases, free books, audio books or movies.
Research of unknown
Digging into the ‘invisible’ part of the internet is not difficult nor prohibited, but requires a lot of time and patience. As most of the content in the deep web is specialized and related to specific topics, users should search at least twice.
First you should make use of the major search engines like Google, Yahoo or any other search engines that you normally use, to find a particular database. What search terms are more specific to make and the results should be more relevant. Try phrases like ‘jobs in London’ or ‘weather forecast for Paris.
Then, when you find a particular database that contains information that could be useful, start by searching the database itself. That part of the search can ‘steal’ the hours and days to reach the volume of data that you need to manually search and that can distract from what actually you are looking for.
The leap into the unknown
If you are an adventurous mood, or simply are not satisfied with the results of which are available from your Internet browser, try searching deep web. It might surprise you that everything there can be found if you look hard enough. Check out this interesting infographic about secerets that hiding deep web:
