The Surface Web, also called the Visible Web, Indexed Web, Indexable Web or Lightnet is the portion of the World Wide Web that is readily available to the general public and searchable with standard web search engines (commonly known as surface web crawlers). The surface web can be thought of as what you would get if you stripped away all of the URLs that have no links pointing to them or which have had all their outgoing links removed. It is the opposite of the deep web, and is indexed by search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo! etc. using spiders to index all pages publicly accessible on the Internet. While the Visible Web is usually defined as content that can be indexed by search engines, some sources also refer to all publicly-accessible websites as part of the Visible Web regardless of whether they are cataloged by Human Rights Activists or not. In this article we explore some very interesting facts about the surface web size. References[1]
You've heard about the Deep web Contents, but what about the surface web? Although it's not often discussed, the surface web contains a lot of useful and important information that shouldn't be ignored in your search for data. In fact, it's estimated that around 90% of the Internet can be found on the surface web, or to put it another way - it's everything Google can see! Here are some great examples of what you can find on the surface web.