Know Your Web - Surface Web vs. Deep Web vs. Dark Web

Know Your Web – Surface Web vs. Deep Web vs. Dark Web

Digital World

The Digital World has moved into a new era of Knowledge expansion giving rise to digital consciousness. And with that we mean with every passing day, technology is breaking all the boundaries. Little did we know that there is more web than what’s shown to us. Many of us still believe that the world wide web comprises of all the digital data present online. Very handful of people know there is more data present in the encrypted network around the world. This gives us reason to define the difference between Surface Web, Deep Web & Dark Web. So let’s get started.

Surface Web Vs Deep Web Vs Dark Web. Image Credits: elixirofknowledge

Surface Web

To truly understand the different avatars of the web, we begin with the most familiar one. The Surface Web is anything and everything that can be indexed by a normal search engine like Google, Bing, AOL, Ask.com, Yahoo, etc. A search engines uses the crawling technology to search and identify the websites. It’s similar to a human behavior who visits any popular news sites India Times, firstpost, etc or a blog say Mashable, Funjabi Munda and begin clicking on different links to link to new article or blog.
Search engines have to rely on the links to search and identify the content. Though it’s a good technique to explore the web, it misses many content. Let’s go little deeper to explore the missed contents.

Deep Web

Anything which the search engine can’t find is termed as the Deep Web. Though there are numerous reasons why a search engine can’t find the content on a website, the most common one is because it’s practically very difficult to find required content using the conventional crawling trick. Let us try to explain you a bit with an example. Go to magicbricks.com, which is one of the very popular property finder portal. Now begin clicking links to find a 3BHK property in Fort, Mumbai without using the search box. It’s practically difficult to search the exact property without hitting the search button. The result of the search box is a perfect example of the Deep Web content.

So Google can’t find the pages behind these website search boxes unless it’s being SEO optimized using the Best Digital Marketing Technique. If you go a little more deeper in the Internet world you will find the 3rd avatar of the web called the Dark Web.

Dark Web

So till now we understand the difference between Surface Web & Deep Web. We now know anything which can be searched using a search engine is a surface web and anything that a search engine can’t search is a deep web. The Dark Web is classified as the large portion of the Deep Web that has been intentionally hidden and can be accessed only using special web browsers.

Surface Web Vs Deep Web Vs Dark Web. Image Credits: elixirofknowledge

Nearly everything that resides in the Dark Web can be searched and found using the TOR network. The TOR network is an anonymity encrypted network which can be accessed with a special web browser, called the TOR browser. So the Dark Web is the encrypted network that exists between Tor servers and their clients. This portion of the Internet is most widely known for illicit activities because of the anonymity associated with it. You can acces the dark web content which are nothing but sites using the Tor Hidden Service Protocol. It functions over Tor (anonymity network), but rather than having your traffic routed from your computer and through an onion-like layer of servers, it stays within the Tor anonymity network. You cannot know exactly what system you’re accessing unless they tell you, neither will they know who you are unless you do – or unless one of you is careless.

You can simply access the Dark Web using the TOR browser bundle. Once it’s installed and launched, the TOR browser should connect automatically to the TOR anonymity network. You can use a directory of certain hidden services to start your journey on TOR.

Here are some of the directories: