The deep web

The deep web is always a phrase I have heard in passing. I know about websites like the silk road but have never really thought about the implications of what can happen on the deep web. The deep web is defined by Wikipedia as the “portion of the World Wide Web content that is not indexed by standard search engines”.  The portion of the web that can be accessed normally is known as the surface web. To use the deep web one has to use browsers that make the user anonymous and make it so that content being accessed cannot be tracked. This makes the deep web perfect for illegal ventures. This is why the deep web is also known as the dark web.  The things I have heard people finding on the deep web are rather shocking and hard to believe. Of course you find people selling drugs and guns, but I have even heard friends say there are places to hire hit men. The most disturbing thing I have heard is something referred to as the Human experiment which is apparently a website for medical researches to communicate illegal research they do on the homeless.  Manny of this thing sound like the kind of jokes people I have seen online would make. Even acknowledging this there is something scary about the deep web. Clearly horrible things go on the world people sell unregister guns to criminals, sell hard drugs to addicts, and even participate in human trafficking. It is scary to think that the deep web facilitates all of these things that hurt people.  

I would guess that this content would represent a small portion of the entire internet. Interestingly, I have seen sources that claim that the deep web is vastly bigger than the regular web in size. I have seen claims that it is 500 times the size of the regular internet. My gut reaction to these claims is that they must be wrong.  I would guess that people might be citing older research but the very nature of the deep web makes it hard to say for sure how much data it holds. I think this is what is unsettling about the deep web to me, it is so mysterious. A great analogy I’ve seen for it is that the collection of everything on the internet is the ocean.  Our search engines our fish like nets being dragged along the water. Our nets are very limited and only drag just below the water. The dark web is the huge dark amount of water way below the surface that is hard to comprehend at seems foreign.

Part of the reason for writing this blog is to see if other people in the class know more about the deep web. It is something I am really fascinated by and want to try to good picture of what it is. While that might not be possible I still want to know more. Let me know if you have had or know anyone who has any experiences with the deep wen.