Definition: surface Web

Content on the World Wide Web that is available to the general public. The surface Web is indexed by the major search engines (see spider). Also called the "crawlable Web" and "public Web," links to the pages on the surface Web are displayed on search engine results pages. Descriptive text on the pages as well as metatags hidden within the Web pages identify the page's contents for the various search engines. Contrast with deep Web. See search engine optimization and spider.