When data’s deep, dark places need to be illuminated

Much of the data of the World Wide Web hides like an iceberg below the surface. The so-called ‘deep web’ has been estimated to be 500 times bigger than the ‘surface web’ seen through search engines like Google. For scientists and others, the deep web holds important computer code and its licensing agreements. Nestled further inside the deep web, one finds the ‘dark web,’ a place where images and video are used by traders in illicit drugs, weapons, and human trafficking. A new data-intensive supercomputer called Wrangler is helping researchers obtain meaningful answers from the hidden data of the public web.