Best Deep Search Engines to Explore the Invisible Web
Google or Bing can’t search for everything. To explore the invisible web, you need to use these special deep search engines.
Not everything on the web will show up in a list of search results on Google or Bing; there are numerous places that the sites’ web crawlers cannot access.
To explore the invisible web, you need to use specialist search engines. Here are our top 12 services to perform a deep internet search.
What Is the Invisible Web?
Before we begin, let’s establish what does the term “invisible web” refer to? Simply, it’s a catch-all term for online content that will not appear in search results or web directories.
There is no official data available, but most experts agree that the invisible web is several times larger than the visible web. Given that Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Facebook alone store more than 1,200 petabytes between them, the numbers quickly become mind-boggling.
The content on the invisible web can be roughly divided into the deep web and the dark web.
The Deep Web
The deep web is made up of content that typically needs some form of accreditation to access. For example, library databases, email inboxes, personal records (financial, academic, health, and legal), cloud storage drives, company intranets, etc.
If you have the correct details, you can access the content through a regular web browser.
The Dark Web
The dark web is a subsection of the deep web. You need to use a dedicated browser (such as Tor) to access dark web content. It’s more anonymous than the regular web and is thus often the home of illegal activities such as drug and weapon sales.
However, not everything on the dark web is illegal. Some of the best dark web websites are just versions of regular sites, but are hidden to enable users in totalitarian regimes to access them.
1. Pipl
Pipl brands itself as the world’s largest people search engine. Unlike Google, Pipl can interact with searchable databases, member directories, court records, and other deep internet search content to offer you a detailed snapshot of a person. You can also use Pipl to deep search yourself.
2. The Wayback Machine
The WayBack Machine website
Regular search engines only provide results from the most recent version of a website that’s available.
The Wayback Machine is different. It has copies of more than 361 billion web pages on its servers, allowing you to search for content that’s no longer available on the visible web. It’s also a handy site for viewing old versions of any website.
3. The Machine
Virtual Library
The WWW Virtual Library is the oldest catalog on the web. It was started by Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the World Wide Web, back in 1991.
Volunteers compile the list of links by hand, thus creating a high-quality index of deep web content across dozens of categories.
4. DuckDuckGo
DuckDuckGo is well-known as one of the best private search engines for the visible web and offers one of the best privacy-focused smartphone browsers. But did you know the company also offers an onion site that lets you explore the dark web?
Even the regular search engine offers more deep web content than Google. It pools results from more than 500 standalone search tools to find its results. If you pair the regular DuckDuckGo engine with the Onion version, you can perform an entire web search.
5 Elephind
Elephind.com historical newspaper archive
Elephind aims to provide a single portal to all the historical newspapers of the world. It’s a fantastic resource for researchers—especially family historians, genealogists, and students.
Many of the newspapers on the site are exclusively on the deep web; they will not show up on Google. At the time of writing, over 3.6 million newspapers are available.
