Surface Web

The Surface Web (also called the Visible Web, Indexed Web, Indexable Web or Lightnet) is the portion of the World Wide Web that is readily available to the general public and searchable with standard web search engines. It is the opposite of the deep web, the part of the web not indexed by a web search engine.

Surface Web – Essentially the visible web, that is, the Web as is it is generally thought of: static websites (though many connect to Deep Web databases, such as Amazon.com). Example of Surface Web pages may include Google, Facebook, YouTube, the New York Times, and other websites. Iffat & Sami provide an adequate working definition of the Surface Web:

Surface Web is made up of static and fixed pages, whereas Deep Web is made up of dynamic pages. Static pages do not depend on a database for their content. They reside on a server waiting to be retrieved, and are basically html files whose content never changes. Any changes are made directly to the html code and the new version of the page is uploaded to the server .