Dark web

Deep Web (also called the Deepnet, Invisible Web, or Hidden Web) is World Wide Web content that is not part of the Surface Web, which is indexed by standard search engines. It should not be confused with the dark Internet, the computers that can no longer be reached via the Internet, or with a Darknet distributed filesharing network, which could be classified as a smaller part of the Deep Web. Some prosecutors and government agencies think that the Deep Web is a haven for serious criminality.

Mike Bergman, founder of BrightPlanet and credited with coining the phrase, 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. As of 2001, the deep Web was several orders of magnitude larger than the Surface Web.