Surface web facts for kids

The Surface Web is the part of the World Wide Web that you can easily find using regular web search engines like Google or Bing. Think of it as the "visible" part of the internet. It's where most public websites, blogs, and online stores live.

This part of the internet is often called the Visible Web or Indexed Web because search engines can "index" (or list) its pages. This means when you type something into a search engine, it can quickly find and show you results from the Surface Web.

The Surface Web is different from the deep web, which includes parts of the internet that search engines can't easily find. While the internet is huge, the Surface Web is actually a smaller part of it. It's estimated to be only about 10 percent of all the information available online.

Most of the pages on the Surface Web are public web pages. They are stored on servers and set up so that search engines can easily access and add them to their huge lists of websites.

As of 2015, Google's list of pages on the Surface Web contained about 14.8 billion pages. This number is always growing as more websites are created every day.

What is the Surface Web?

The Surface Web is like the front yard of the internet. It includes all the websites and pages that are open for anyone to visit and that search engines can easily find. When you search for something online, you are usually looking at results from the Surface Web.

These pages are made to be public. They are linked together, making it easy for search engines to "crawl" (or explore) them. This crawling process helps search engines build a massive index, which is like a giant library catalog of all the web pages they know about.

How Big is the Surface Web?

Even though the Surface Web feels huge, it's actually just a small part of the entire internet. It's the part that search engines can easily find and show you. For example, in June 2015, Google had found and listed around 14.8 billion pages on the Surface Web. Imagine how many pages that is! This number keeps growing all the time as new websites are added.

Surface Web vs. Deep Web

It's helpful to understand the difference between the Surface Web and the Deep Web.

• The Surface Web is what you see every day. It includes websites like Wikipedia, news sites, and online shops. Search engines can easily find these pages.
• The Deep Web is made of pages that search engines can't easily find. This includes things like your online banking portal, private social media pages, or documents stored in cloud services. These pages are often protected by passwords or are part of databases that search engines don't access directly.

Think of the internet as an ocean. The Surface Web is the part you can see from a boat, like the top layer of water. The Deep Web is everything underneath the surface that you can't see without special equipment.

See also

• Clearnet (networking)