What is the Dark Web, how does it differ from the Deep Web and how can you navigate through it?
For some time now, the media has been talking more and more about the so-called Deep Web or Dark Web. It is almost always done to relate it to criminal activities that take place in the depths of the network, and very rarely do they stop to explain what that Dark Web really is. An example of this is that they call it Deep Web, an erroneous term in most cases.
That's why today we are going to try to explain to you in a simple and understandable way what exactly the Dark Web is, and what is the difference with the Deep Web. And if you are curious, we will also tell you how to download and use a browser specially created to navigate in it.
What exactly is the Dark Web?
To understand what Dark Web is, you have to understand four different concepts: Clearnet, Deep web, Dark web and Darknet. The easiest to understand is the Clearnet, which is the Internet as you know it, the pages that you find in Google and other search engines and which you can access directly from them. For example, espn.com is a page of the Clearnet, because if you google it you find it quickly, and if you enter your web address you do not have problems to enter.
~ 90% of the content of the network is not accessible through search engines. That is a part of the Deep Web, which includes all the information that you can not publicly access. It can be conventional pages protected by a paywall, but also files saved in Dropbox, emails saved in your provider's servers, and all those pages that are created for a few moments, for example, when you set up a travel search engine and it shows you the content.
Imagine, for example, a page that you access by writing a conventional web address, but whose content you can not access if you do not pay a certain fee or a monthly fee. That is Deep Web. So is the page that is generated when you are using a travel search engine. It is a unique web configured with the data you have entered, and which can not be accessed directly.
If the Deep Web is 90% Internet, the Dark Web would occupy only 0.1% of it. It is a portion of the Internet intentionally hidden from the search engines, with masked IP addresses accessible only with a special web browser. The Dark Web is therefore part of the Deep Web, but they are different things. For example, if the Deep Web were a city, the Dark Web would be several neighborhoods. They are part of the city, but they are not the city.
The Dark Web is the content that you can find in different Darknets, which are each of the networks that you can only access with specific programs. The most popular is TOR, but you also have Freenet, I2P or ZeroNet. Each of these is a Darknet, but when we refer to all of them we generally use the term Dark Web.
The Dark Web is usually defined as a non-indexable area by conventional search engines, which means that you can not find your pages in Google, Bing and other search engines. But there is some exception. For example, search engines have been created for Darknets like TOR, and we have some search engines like DuckDuckGo that are also working on including this type of content.