Searching on the Internet today can be compared to dragging a net across the surface of the ocean. While a great deal may be caught in the net, there is still a wealth of information that is deep, and therefore, missed. The reason is simple: Most of the Web's information is buried far down on dynamically generated sites, and standard search engines never find it.
Here are some facts on The Deep Web:
· Public information on the deep Web is currently 400 to 550 times larger than the commonly defined World Wide Web.
· The deep Web contains 7,500 terabytes of information compared to 19 terabytes of information in the surface Web.
· The deep Web contains nearly 550 billion individual documents compared to the 1 billion of the surface Web.
· More than 200,000 deep Web sites presently exist.
· Sixty of the largest deep-Web sites collectively contain about 750 terabytes of information — sufficient by themselves to exceed the size of the surface Web forty times.
· The deep Web is the largest growing category of new information on the Internet.
· Deep Web sites tend to be narrower, with deeper content, than conventional surface sites.
· Total quality content of the deep Web is 1,000 to 2,000 times greater than that of the surface Web.
· Deep Web content is highly relevant to every information need, market, and domain.
· More than half of the deep Web content resides in topic-specific databases.
· A full ninety-five per cent of the deep Web is publicly accessible information — not subject to fees or subscriptions.
