There are underground markets selling drugs, and many of these, like the Silk Road, essentially sell marijuana altogether. Like any place where human beings gather, there is an illegal activity. There are some legitimate applications for the dark web, for example, by people living under authoritarian governments. To access dark websites requires specialized software such as the TOR browser or another darknet enabling tool. However, the dark web is also opaque to standard web browsers. So really, the dark web is just another tool, and government agencies use it all over the world along with journalists, dissidents, whistleblowers, and countries with hostile governments, and just regular folks who want to create and use anonymous online communities. As it became publicly facing the world wide web, new technologies on the Internet were created to ensure its use for defense. The Department of Defense initially funded the Internet. Will you find crime? Yes, but not to the degree that media has claimed, and crime is neither the primary use of the darknet. The small corner of the Internet comprises confidential information that the public cannot access. Like the deep web, it is hidden from search engines. This dark web makes up approximately five percent of the web. If you know about a site and have a login, you can browse the deep web via standard web browsers. The deep web makes up 80 to 90 percent of the whole worldwide web. When you log into your online bank, you are using a deep website. It includes private corporate sites, paywalled sites, health providers, and lots more. The deep web comprises all of the websites and applications that are not open to search engines for general indexing and discovery. It simply accounts for the vast unindexed content online, the raw data that Google doesn’t know about and doesn’t care about. The Deep Web is not a place that is not hidden and consists of zero criminal activity. The media usually describes the Deep Web as a vast hidden area five thousand times larger than the surface web and loaded with criminals, but that is false. The surface web is the web that most people know and use.Įstimates put this section at about six to ten percent of the deep web complete web infrastructure in use. The clear or surface web is the part that is open to indexing for search engines such as Google.

Tor websites onion