The deep Web (or Deepnet, invisible Web or hidden Web) refers to World Wide Web content that is not part of the surface Web indexed by search engines. Dr. Jill Ellsworth coined the term "Invisible Web" in 1994 to refer to websites that are not registered with any search engine (Bergman, 2001).^[1] WWWs historical logo designed by Robert Cailliau The World Wide Web is a system of interlinked, hypertext documents accessed via the Internet. ... The surface web is that portion of the World Wide Web that is indexed by conventional search engines. ... Search engine indexing entails how data is collected, parsed, and stored to facilitate fast and accurate retrieval. ... Google search is the worlds most popular search engine. ...

Indiana University faculty member Javed Mustafa appeared on National Public Radio's Science Friday program on July 27, 2007, and drawing on information in a published study from University of California, Berkeley entitled How much information is there?, estimated that the deep web consists of about 91,000 terabytes. By contrast, the surface web, which is easily reached by search engines, is only about 167 terabytes. The Library of Congress contains about 11 terabytes, for comparison. Mustafa noted that these numbers were a bit dated and were just rough estimates.^[2][3] Indiana University, founded in 1820, is a nine-campus university system in the state of Indiana. ... “NPR” redirects here. ... Science Friday is a call-in talk show that is part of National Public Radios Talk of the Nation radio program hosted by Ira Flatow every Friday. ... Sather tower (the Campanile) looking out over the San Francisco Bay and Mount Tamalpais. ... This article is about a measurement term for data storage capacity. ... The Library of Congress is the de facto national library of the United States and the research arm of the United States Congress. ...

Less commonly, the term deep Web may represent deeper interaction.

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 e.g. 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 pragma:no-cache/cache-control:no-cache HTTP headers), prohibiting 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 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.

In classical hypertext navigation occurs among static documents, and, for web users, this experience is reproduced using static web pages. ... See WebCrawler for the specific search engine of that name. ... The robots exclusion standard or robots. ... Early CAPTCHAs such as these, generated by the EZ-Gimpy program, were used on Yahoo. ... Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is a method used to transfer or convey information on the World Wide Web. ... Look up cache in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... It has been suggested that Client-side JavaScript be merged into this article or section. ... // == Macromedia Flash == ==]] Using Macromedia Flash 8 (bundled in Studio 8) in Windows XP. Maintainer: Adobe Systems (formerly Macromedia) Latest release: 8 / September 30th, 2005 OS: Windows (no native Windows XP Professional x64 Edition support), Mac OS X, Linux (i386 only, via wine [1]) Use: Multimedia Content Creator License: Proprietary Website... // Ajax (mythology), also known as Telamonian Ajax or Ajax the Great, a Greek hero and legendary king of Salamis who plays an important role in Homers Iliad Ajax the Lesser, or Oilean Ajax, a Greek hero and legendary king of Locris who appears in Homers Iliad Ajax (Sophocles... A file format is a particular way to encode information for storage in a computer file. ...

Accessing

To discover content on the Web, search engines use web crawlers that follow hyperlinks. This technique is ideal for discovering resources on the surface Web but is often ineffective at finding deep Web resources. For example, these crawlers do not attempt to find dynamic pages that are the result of database queries due to the infinite number of queries that are possible. It has been noted that this can be (partially) overcome by providing links to query results, but this could unintentionally inflate the popularity (e.g., PageRank) for a member of the deep Web. A web crawler (also known as a Web spider or Web robot) is a program or automated script which browses the World Wide Web in a methodical, automated manner. ... // A hyperlink (often referred to as simply a link), is a reference or navigation element in a document to another section of the same document, another document, or a specified section of another document, that automatically brings the referred information to the user when the navigation element is selected by... The surface web is that portion of the World Wide Web that is indexed by conventional search engines. ... How PageRank Works PageRank is a link analysis algorithm that assigns a numerical weighting to each element of a hyperlinked set of documents, such as the World Wide Web, with the purpose of measuring its relative importance within the set. ...

In 2005, Yahoo! made a small part of the deep web searchable by releasing Yahoo! Subscriptions. This search engine searches through a few subscription-only web sites. Year 2005 (MMV) was a common year starting on Saturday (link displays full calendar) of the Gregorian calendar. ... Yahoo! Inc. ...

Some search tools such as Pipl are being designed to retrieve information from the deep Web; their crawlers are set to identify and somehow interact with searchable databases, aiming to provide access to deep Web content.

Crawling the deep Web

Researchers have been exploring how the deep Web can be crawled in an automatic fashion. Raghavan and Garcia-Molina (2001) presented an architectural model for a hidden-Web crawler that used key terms provided by users or collected from the query interfaces to query a Web form and crawl the deep Web resources. Ntoulas et al. (2005) created a hidden-Web crawler that automatically generated meaningful queries to issue against search forms. Their crawler generated promising results, but the problem is far from being solved.

Since a large amount of useful data and information resides in the deep Web, search engines have begun exploring alternative methods to crawl the deep Web. Google’s Sitemap Protocol and mod oai are mechanisms that allow search engines and other interested parties to discover deep Web resources on particular Web servers. Both mechanisms allow Web servers to advertise the URLs that are accessible on them, thereby allowing automatic discovery of resources that are not directly linked to the surface Web. // About The Google Sitemap Protocol allows you to inform search engines about URLs on your website that are available for crawling. ... mod_oai is an Apache module that allows web crawlers to efficiently discover new, modified, and deleted web resources from a web server by using OAI-PMH, a protocol which is widely used in the digital libaries community. ...

Another way to access the deep Web is to crawl it by subject category or vertical. Since traditional engines have difficulty crawling and indexing deep Web pages and their content, deep Web search engines like CloserLookSearch, and Northern Light create specialty engines by topic to search the deep Web. Because these engines are narrow in their data focus, they are built to access specified deep Web content by topic. These engines can search dynamic or password protected databases that are otherwise closed to search engines. Northern Light Group, LLC is a company specializing in knowledge management for market research and custom enterprise search applications. ...

Classifying resources

It is difficult to automatically determine if a Web resource is a member of the surface Web or the deep Web. If a resource is indexed by a search engine, it is not necessarily a member of the surface Web since the resource could have been found using the Sitemap Protocol, mod_oai, OAIster, etc. instead of traditional crawling. If a search engine provides a backlink for a resource, one may assume that the resource is in the surface Web. Unfortunately, search engines do not always provide all backlinks to resources. Even if a backlink does exist, there is no way to determine if the resource providing the link is itself in the surface Web without crawling all of the Web. Furthermore, a resource may reside in the surface Web, but it has not yet been found by a search engine. Therefore, if we have an arbitrary resource, we cannot know for sure if the resource resides in the surface Web or deep Web without a complete crawl of the Web. The Sitemaps Protocol allows a webmaster to inform search engines about URLs on a website that are available for crawling. ... mod_oai is an Apache module that allows web crawlers to efficiently discover new, modified, and deleted web resources from a web server by using OAI-PMH, a protocol which is widely used in the digital libaries community. ... OAIster is a project of the University of Michigan Digital Library Production Service. ... Backlinks are incoming links to a website or web page. ...

The concept of classifying search results by topic was pioneered by Yahoo! Directory search and is gaining importance as search becomes more relevant in day to day decisions. However, most of the work here has been in categorizing the surface Web by topic. There is little pioneering work done on the deep Web in this area. This classification poses a challenge while searching the deep Web whereby two levels of categorization are required. The first level is to categorize sites into vertical topics (health, travel, automobiles, etc.) and sub-topics according to the nature of the content underlying their databases. Several deep Web directories are under development such as OAIster by the University of Michigan, and DirectSearch by Gary Price to name a few. OAIster is a project of the University of Michigan Digital Library Production Service. ... Gary Price is a librarian, best known for founding resourceshelf. ...

The second, more difficult, challenge is to categorize and map the information extracted from multiple deep Web sources according to end-user needs. Deep Web search reports cannot display URL's like traditional search reports. End users expect their search tools to not only find what they are looking for quickly, but to be intuitive and user-friendly. In order to be meaningful, the search reports have to offer some depth to the nature of content that underlie the sources or else the end-user will be lost in the sea of URLs that do not indicate what content lies underneath them. The format in which search results are to be presented varies widely by the particular topic of the search and the type of content being exposed. The challenge is to find and map similar data elements from multiple disparate sources so that search results may be exposed in a unified format on the search report irrespective of their source.

History

In 1994, Dr. Jill Ellsworth was the first to coin the term "Invisible Web" (Bergman, 2001). In a January 1996 article, Ellsworth states:

"It would be a site that's possibly reasonably designed, but they didn't bother to register it with any of the search engines. So, no one can find them! You're hidden. I call that the invisible Web."

The first commercial deep web tool (although they referred to it as the "Invisible Web") was @1, announced December 12th, 1996 in partnership with large content providers. According to the December 12th, 1996 press release @1 started with 5.7 terabytes of content which was estimated to be 30 times the size of the nascent World Wide Web.

Another early use of the term "invisible web" was by Bruce Mount (Director of Product Development) and Dr. Matthew B. Koll (CEO/Founder) of PLS when describing @1 to the public. PLS was acquired by AOL in 1998 and @1 was abandoned.

References

1. ^ Business and Marketing on the Internet, FRANK GARCIA, 1996.
2. ^ Hour Two: Depression Medication / Baby Talk / Search Engines, Science Friday, National Public Radio, July 27, 2007
3. ^ The unpublished paper How much information is there in the world?, by Michael Lesk in 1997, estimated that in 1997, the Library of Congress had between 20 terabytes and 3 petabytes.

Science Friday is a call-in talk show that is part of National Public Radios Talk of the Nation radio program hosted by Ira Flatow every Friday. ... “NPR” redirects here. ... Mike Lesk is an American computer programmer. ... The Library of Congress is the de facto national library of the United States and the research arm of the United States Congress. ... This article is about a measurement term for data storage capacity. ... A petabyte (derived from the SI prefix peta- ) is a unit of information or computer storage equal to one quadrillion bytes. ...

See also

• Robots Exclusion Standard
• Surface Web
• Web crawler

The robots exclusion standard or robots. ... The surface web is that portion of the World Wide Web that is indexed by conventional search engines. ... A web crawler (also known as a Web spider or Web robot) is a program or automated script which browses the World Wide Web in a methodical, automated manner. ...

External links

• DIET: DIET (Deep Information and Extraction Tool) is a web tool developed by a research team at Ecole Polytechnique de Montréal, which has been commercialized by Univalor. It permits a user to find information residing in the deep web, extract it and manipulate it.

The École Polytechnique de Montréal is an engineering school in Montreal, Quebec. ...

References

• Personal Library Software (Dec 1996) press release announcing @1 as an "Invisible Web" search service

• AOL (Dec 1996) press release announcing AOL's participation in @1

• Panagiotis Ipeirotis, Luis Gravano, and Mehran Sahami (2001). "Probe, Count, and Classify: Categorizing Hidden-Web Databases". In Proceedings of the 2001 ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data: 67-78. 

• Gary Price & Chris Sherman (July 2001). The Invisible Web : Uncovering Information Sources Search Engines Can't See. CyberAge Books, ISBN 0-910965-51-X.

• Michael K. Bergman (Aug 2001). "The Deep Web: Surfacing Hidden Value". The Journal of Electronic Publishing 7 (1). 

• Sriram Raghavan and Hector Garcia-Molina (2001). "Crawling the Hidden Web". In Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Very Large Data Bases (VLDB): 129-138. 

• Nigel Hamilton (2003). The Mechanics of a Deep Net Metasearch Engine - 12th World Wide Web Conference poster.

• Bin He and Kevin Chen-Chuan Chang (2003). "Statistical Schema Matching across Web Query Interfaces". In Proceedings of the 2003 ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data. 

• Joe Barker (Jan 2004). Invisible Web: What it is, Why it exists, How to find it, and Its inherent ambiguity UC Berkeley - Teaching Library Internet Workshops.

• Alex Wright (Mar 2004). In Search of the Deep Web, Salon.com, http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2004/03/09/deep_web/

• Alexandros Ntoulas, Petros Zerfos, and Junghoo Cho (2005). "Downloading Textual Hidden Web Content Through Keyword Queries". In Proceedings of the Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL): 100-109.  Extended version

• Frank McCown, Xiaoming Liu, Michael L. Nelson, and Mohammad Zubair (Mar/Apr 2006). "Search Engine Coverage of the OAI-PMH Corpus". IEEE Internet Computing 10 (2): 66-73. 

• Steve Gruchawka (June 2006). How-To Guide to the Deep Web TechDeepWeb.com, http://TechDeepWeb.com

• Bin He, Mitesh Patel, Zhen Zhang, and Kevin Chen-Chuan Chang (May 2007). "Accessing the Deep Web: A Survey". Communications of the ACM (CACM) 50 (2): 94-101.