What is the Invisible Web? It largely exists within the realm of the Deep Web, which general-purpose web crawlers cannot reach. To learn about the Invisible Web and how Deep Web search engines can help, we first need to briefly discuss the three layers of the web.
The “Surface Web” is where most Internet users will stay. It’s the web that Google searches, including this webpage. Search engines crawl and index all of the sites that live within the Surface Web. This is what the layperson understands as the Internet.
- The “Deep Web,” or Shadow Web, is a laundry list of databases, servers, and programs that will not appear in an online search result or the Web directly. For the most part, experts consider the Shallow Web to be considerably larger than the Surface Web.
- The “Dark Web” is something you generally hear about in the news or in movies. This is best regarded as the home to more illicit activities. That’s not the entirety of the Dark Web, but you cannot access them without the help of the Tor browser.
The actual differences between the Deep and Dark Web are quite blurred now. Together, these two comprise the Invisible Web. We consider the Deep/Dark Web “invisible,” as they don’t have a fixed website location.
For example, most public records are stored in databases and not on individual static web pages. This makes it “invisible” to Google, but we can get this information from Deep Web search engines.
Learn more about the Tor project
https://www.torproject.org/about/history