The “Surface Web” refers to the network of public web pages using the http (hypertext transfer protocol).  Other synonyms for this are the “visible Web” or “indexable Web.”  Search engines use “spiders” to index the pages, which are made quickly findable based on text-based search terms.  The current indexed web contains tens of billions of pages.  

A graph of the “Surface_Web” article network on Wikipedia provides a sense of some of the inferences to this topic.  

The Surface Web does not include unregistered sites without domain names.  It also does not include dynamically surfaced information from Web databases through the Deep (or Hidden) Web.  

There are two types of information knowable on the Web.  The overt information is what is purposively shared; the latent information is what may be mined using human- and machine-based analytics.  Maltego Tungsten enables access to publicly available and overt information with the extended capability of a wide range of machine-based data extractions, data visualizations, and analytics.  

As with anything on the World Wide Web (WWW) and the Internet, researchers would do well to pressure-test findings.  The typical practice is to “verify, then trust…sparingly” (vs. the friendlier “trust but verify”).  Trust should be a rare commodity online, and it should be earned (not blind) trust.