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Some Fast Facts About the Invisible Web
2001:
- Even the best search engines can access only about 16% of the available information on the World Wide Web. Therefore 84% of the information is excluded. That 84% has become known as the Invisible Web.
- Put another way, the size of the Invisible Web is 500 times larger than the Surface Web.
- The Invisible Web contains nearly 550 billion individual documents as compared with the Surface Web's 1 billion.
- The Invisible Web is the largest growing category of new information on the Web.
- 95% of the Invisible Web is publicly accessible information.
- More than half of the Invisible Web resides in topic specific databases.
(Bergman 2001)
2003:
- Surface Web: 167 terabytes
- Deep Web: 91,850 terabytes
(Lyman 2003)
2006:
2012:
- 11+ billion static pages are hidden from the public as well as 450+ billion database-driven are completely invisible to Google
(Paul Gil 2013)
2013:
- "Trillions + pages of information" that current search engines cannot find
(Zillman 2015)
- "In fact, typical search engines like Google, Yahoo, or Bing actually access only a tiny fraction estimated at 0.03% of the internet.
(Ultimate Guide to the Invisible Web 2013)
Updated September 2015
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