What Is the Deep Web?

Being on the Deep Web is not unlawful in itself, but it depends on what you end up doing there, since visiting some pages could lead to illegal actions, for instance, viewing or purchasing child pornography. If you check your personal bank account, Yahoo email or social media profile, you're navigating the "good side" of the Deep Net. That information is concealed from the general public but it's perfectly legal. The illegal part of the Deep Web starts when you enter the Dark Web (and its ultimate online Black Markets) and you purchase counterfeit money, stolen credit card numbers, drugs, fake IDs, hacking tools or if you hire hackers to steal vulnerable data, commit malicious cyberattacks, data theft or break into people's computers.

A Deep Web search is the deepest, most substantial type of web search that reveals information impossible to find with a standard Internet search. The searching mechanism is capable of accessing all the unreachable parts of the deep web. Conventional web search engines like Google, Bing, or Yahoo only scratch the surface. Their search results are basic, limited, and not excessively useful, offering an incomplete range of information. Everything that's not available in a standard search is comprehensively revealed by a simple Deep Web search, including hidden internet or social profiles, leaked, stolen, or hacked personal data or secret online activity, blogs, websites.

According to the University of California, the size of the Deep Web is estimated at around 7.500 terabytes (or 7.5 petabytes) of data, split across more than 200,000 deep web sites. By comparison, the Surface Web has 19 terabytes. The 60 largest Deep Web pages hold together almost 750 terabytes of information, exceeding the size of the Surface Web 40 times. And while the Surface Web grants access to approximately 1 billion individual documents, the content featured on the Deep Web allegedly contains between 500 and 550 times more public information records than the common Internet we access via regular search engines.

The TOR browser (an acronym of "The Onion Router") guarantees one of the highest degrees of real anonymity and is extremely effective at hiding user location. The information circulates through a complex circuit of heavy-duty encrypted layers to protect the inquirer's privacy. That's why it's almost impossible for TOR network traffic to be tracked. The online activities carried out through it cannot be traced back to the initiating user and their devices.

The TOR browser doesn't actually hide your IP, but it simply transports the information through such a complex web of secret connections while encrypting it, that's it's impossible to follow anything back to its origins. This method is known as the "avalanche effect". TOR is often compared to a "network of virtual tunnels" given the fact that it was initially created by the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory to route top-secret information and protect confidential government communications.

Google might have the answer to most questions, but it cannot perform a search on the Deep Web because most of the data available there is only reachable through login pages, therefore fully protected by passwords. Public search engines like Google don't index sensitive data and Deep Web content falls under Google web crawlers' radar.

Although the Deep Web is not dangerous, there's a subpart of it called the Dark Web that can be scary as it's a mysterious gateway to the most hazardous, evil and forbidden illegal niches, including viewing, distributing, and selling pedophilic content, software/computer viruses, guns trading hubs, animal abuse, stillborn babies, sex-slave trading, human leather, paid assassins, tax fraud schemes or human experiments. The more you engage or purchase merchandise sold on its black marketplaces by cybercriminals, terrorists, hackers, and sex offenders, the more you're exposing yourself to scams, hacks, and real-life threats that could even get FBI's attention at some point. Whatever you do, is at your own risk.