

Factset: FactSet Research Systems Inc.2019. Market indices are shown in real time, except for the DJIA, which is delayed by two minutes. Others that are publicly accessible are Infoplease, PubMed and the University of California's Infomine.Īnd if you're really brave, download the Tor browser bundle. Stanford, for example, has built a prototype engine called the Hidden Web Exposer, HiWE. Whatever search engine can accurately and quickly comb the full Web could be useful for Big Data collection - particularly for researchers of climate, finance or government records.

While the Deep Web stays mostly hidden from public view, it is growing in economic importance. But in the last decade, it's also become a hub for black markets that sell or distribute drugs (think Silk Road), stolen credit cards, illegal pornography, pirated media and more. Some use it for sensitive communications, including political dissent. Naval Research Laboratory as a method for communicating online anonymously. It first debuted as The Onion Routing project in 2002, made by the U.S. People use Tor so that their Web activity can't be traced - it runs on a relay system that bounces signals among different Tor-enabled computers around the world.

onion) that require special software to access them. It's a collection of secret websites (ending in. Then there's Tor, the darkest corner of the Internet. These internal networks - say, at corporations or universities - have access to message boards, personnel files or industrial control panels that can flip a light switch or shut down a power plant. The next batch has pages kept private by companies that charge a fee to see them, like the government documents on LexisNexis and Westlaw or the academic journals on Elsevier.Īnother 13% of pages lie hidden because they're only found on an Intranet. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NASA, the Patent and Trademark Office and the Securities and Exchange Commission's EDGAR search system - all of which are public.

A report in 2001 - the best to date - estimates 54% of websites are databases. The vast majority of the Deep Web holds pages with valuable information. So, what's down there? It depends on where you look. Google and others also don't capture pages behind private networks or standalone pages that connect to nothing at all. "When the web crawler arrives at a, it typically cannot follow links into the deeper content behind the search box," said Nigel Hamilton, who ran Turbo10, a now-defunct search engine that explored the Deep Web. Consider the results from a query on the Census Bureau site. What they don't capture are dynamic pages, like the ones that get generated when you ask an online database a question.
