What is Deep Web??

Deep Web, also known as “Deepnet,” the “Invisible Web,” the “Undernet” or the “hidden Web,” are parts of the Internet that are not considered part of the “surface web,” or the portion of the World Wide Web(WWW) that is indexed by conventional search engines. Many deep web sites are not indexed because they use dynamic databases that are devoid of hyperlinks and can only be found by performing an internal search query.

Put simply, it is the partion of the internet that is hidden from viewing by typical browsers.

• Surface Web

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• 4% of the WWW content
• Also known as the ‘Visible Web’, it is content that can be found and frequently using by search engines such as Google or Yahoo. It is controlled under constant surveillance by the government.
• Deep Web

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• 96% of the WWW content
• Also known as the ‘Invisible Web’, it is the content of the internet that cannot be indexed by search engines. And it is hard to keep track of and thus not in control.

The Deep Web is estimated to be at least 500x the size of the Surface Web which we use day-today life.

According to The New York Times, computer scientist Mike Bergman is credited with coining the term of “deep web” in a paper which is titled “The Deep Web: Surfacing Hidden Value” published in The Journal of Electronic Publishing in August year of 2001. In the paper, Bergman mentions that Internet business author Dr. Jill Ellsworth coined the phrase “invisible Web” in 1994 when referring to websites that were not viewed by common search engines. Addition to that the paper also estimated that at the time of publication, information on the deep Web was “400 to 550 times larger than the commonly defined World Wide Web,” or approximately 7,500 terabytes of data.

Methods which prevent web pages from being indexed by traditional search engines and belongs to deep web can be categorized in to following areas:

1. Contextual Web: pages with content differs for different access contexts (e.g., ranges of client IP addresses or previous navigation sequence).
2. Dynamic content: dynamic pages which are returned in response to a submitted query or accessed only by using a form, specially if open-domain input elements (such as text fields) are used; such fields are hard to navigate without domain knowledge.
3. Limited access content: sites that limit access to their pages in a technical method (e.g., using the Robots Exclusion Standard or CAPTCHAs, or no-store directive which prohibit search engines from browsing them and creating cached copies).
4. Non-HTML/text content: textual content which is encoded in multimedia (image or video) files or specific file formats not handled by search engines.
5. Private Web: sites that require registration and login to be accessed (password-protected resources).
6. Scripted content: pages that are only accessible through links produced by JavaScript as well as content dynamically downloaded from Web servers such as via Flash or Ajax solutions.
7. Software: certain content is intentionally hidden from the regular Internet which we are using, accessible only with special software, such as Tor, I2P, or other darknet software. For example, Tor allows users to access websites using the .onion server address anonymously, hiding their IP address.
8. Unlinked content: pages which are not directly linked to by other pages, which may prevent web crawling programs from accessing the content. This content is referred to as pages without backlinks (also mentioned as inlinks). Also, search engines do not always detect all backlinks from searched web pages.
9. Web archives: Web archival services such as the Wayback Machine enable to people who use internet to see archived versions of web pages across time, including websites which have become inaccessible, and are not indexed by search engines such as Google/yahoo.

Is it legal?

Yes. You use it as you are using any internet browser. Many people are now started to use TOR as a way to maintain their privacy whilst online.

• Who else uses it:

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• In Military Cases
• Police and crime units worldwide
• Journalists worldwide
• Whistleblowers

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• Edward Snowden
• Julian Assange

Due to the anonymity that TOR offers, the Deep Web has also become a popular nesting ground for various criminal activity. This includes things such as:

• Drug dealing
• Weapons trading illegally
• Child pornography