You may have heard that in icebergs, 91% of their volume is under water. Something similar also applies to the internet. There is the piece of internet that is open and accessible to anyone. But there is also a second, significantly larger piece, which is not visible to everyone.
Surface Web is the traditional global web we all know. It contains more or less all the websites we visit regularly, such as YouTube, Facebook, Wikipedia etc.
Some other names used for this level of the web are Common Web, Clearnet, Visible Web, or Lightnet.
Surface tissue provides relatively low anonymity and most sites identify their users through their IP address.
This piece of internet is accessible from any browser or software connected to the internet. At the same time, it is detected by the search engines and recorded in the indexes they maintain.
Deep Web is the piece of the web that is not indexed by the familiar search engines. While this sounds complicated, it's actually quite simple.
For example, our personal email is not appearing on search engines, otherwise anyone would have access to a simple search on Google. So our personal email account is actually in Deep Web.
The same applies to our e-banking staff, our social media account settings, the management environment if we have one of our own sites, In practice, every time we enter the Internet, it is very likely that we visit at least one page that is objectively owned by Deep Web.
In addition to our personal accounts, Deep Web includes pages that we only have access to with a link. For example, a YouTube video that is set to "Unlisted".Anyone who has the video link can see it normally even if they do not have a YouTube account.
But unlisted videos never appear on YouTube search, nor are they suggested next to other videos. For users who do not have the link we would say they are completely invisible. By looking at the content of Deep Web, we will see that this is what actually contains the whole web. Its size, according to studies, is 400 to 550 times larger than that of the Surface Web.
