
“There's a lot or legitimate and valuable content in the deep web,” says Juliana Freire, the former leader of a University of Utah project called DeepPeep. By and large, though, the bulk of information in such hidden repositories is legitimate, stashed there by private companies, research institutions and government agencies for security reasons. Put another way, search engines were indexing less than 0.25% of the web pages available. By Mr Bergman's estimate, the deep web contained some 7,500 terabytes of information, compared with a mere 19 terabytes in the public web at the time. Information in the deep web lay hidden from Google's crawlers by residing behind password-protected firewalls or requiring admission forms to be completed manually to gain access. In his pioneering study in 2001, Michael Bergman, a semantics-search-engine whiz based in Iowa, reckoned there was 400 to 550 times more information lurking underground in the deep web than on the surface in the public web. Cybercrime has become prevalent as thieves, hucksters, predators, child pornographers, terrorists, drug cartels and even foreign powers have used the anonymity of the so-called “deep web” to perpetrate crimes. No question that, over the past 20 years, the web has brought numerous benefits. Thanks to the web's ease of navigation and the richness of its HTML formatting language, most of these arcane internet tools have gone the way of the dodo. But users would have had to master the vagaries of Archie, Finger, Gopher, Telnet, Veronica and WAIS (don't even ask). In due course, internet telephony applications like Skype and even streaming video services similar to Hulu or YouTube would have emerged as well. So would news groups, bulletin boards, instant messaging and listservs. No doubt, e-mail would have continued to flourish without the web: it was one of the internet's earliest applications. And without the web, the internet would have remained essentially a tool for geeks and professionals. It is fair to say that, without the internet, the web would not have existed-at least, not in the form we know it today.
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Within a year or two of the web's introduction, software packages such as Viola, Cello and Mosaic had made it possible for users to browse the web graphically-by clicking on highlighted hyperlinks in web pages and being redirected to yet other web pages, and so on. Apart from coming up with the idea for sharing information embedded with hypertext links over the internet, to make it happen Mr Berners-Lee (subsequently knighted for his efforts) had to create the first web browser-editor, the first web server, and the first version of the hypertext mark-up language (HTML), which would become the primary means for publishing information on the web. As conceived, the web is simply another service-albeit a very important one-running on top of the internet. The web, by contrast, is simply a way of organising information on a computer network by means of “hyperlinks”-ie, references to other resources on the network that users can visit directly from the document they are reading. All networks adopting this procedure-no matter where they are or how they actually function-are then reduced effectively to the same bare essentials, allowing them to interconnect and exchange data seamlessly. The genius of the system is that the data tell the network where they want to go, instead of the network telling the data where they are being sent. The internet sends information as discrete packets of data using a suite of protocols known as TCP/IP. The web is not to be confused with the internet-a global system of interconnected networks developed in the 1960s, originally for academic and government researchers in America. It was on August 6th, 1991, that Tim Berners-Lee, a British physicist at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN), in Geneva, created the first-ever web page-a summary of his First, however, a few things to get straight. Whether the web has made it a better place or a worse one is for readers to decide. A case in point: the World Wide Web (With the web having been so thoroughly embraced socially, politically and economically, the world has become an entirely different place from what it was just two decades ago. IT IS always a little disconcerting to realise a generation has grown up never knowing what it was like to manage without something that is taken for granted today.
