Deep Web

Access Science’s article on the internet, while perhaps a little outdated (i.e. needing a dial-up account for email) it provided a decent overview of the basics of the internet and how it is available the public to use. Some of the interesting points that the articled provided was in the discussion of the protocols involved in computer to computer communication. I also had no idea what routers do: keeping track of data fragmentation to provide compatibility between the two computers in communication. Finally, the explanation of the workings of the web was interesting. The web is only a part of the internet, yet the majority of the internet we utilize is via the web.

The second article, "Going beyond the Web's surface," I read examined what most surfers hardly ever get a glimpse of: the internet beyond the web; sometimes referred to the deep web. The deep web, by some estimates is twice as large as the world wide web. This additional data is unavailable because search engines are unable to search the files and there is no domain name associated with the location. Most of the data resides on databases that can only be accessed if a web site provides indexing and search of the database or if the user knows the directory information of the data or files desired. Interestingly, a large part of the deep web data is on U.S. government databases as the U.S. government is the world’s largest publisher.

The accessibility of the deep web is not static, however. PDF files, for example, were once a part of the deep web, but search engines have been able to index the files and now can be searched. I believe with time, eventually all of the data available via the internet will be part of the surface web as search engines improve.