Google bots do three things: they crawl, index and rank webpages.
But when we Google something, we’re only scratching the surface of information online.
Google reckons their search results draw from as little as four or five per cent of what’s available across the internet because their bots (and Bing’s and those working for other search engines) crawl, index and rank content that can be accessed via hyperlinks.
And that’s the tip of the iceberg, because so much information online is invisible, including content that’s…
- Password-protected
- Unpublished
- Not linked to by other sites
- On company intranets
- Accessible only after a search has been performed
- Behind a paywall
That’s the deep web.
The dark web is below that: websites whose addresses are hidden and accessible only by boat or by using a lesser-known browser called Tor, an acronym for The Onion Router, which was created by the US navy for intelligence agents and enables users to use the internet anonymously and access sites that would otherwise never be found.
And here’s where the dark web gets really dark.
It does have its legitimate uses – preserving the anonymity of activists and journalists, for example – but due to its nature, there is, so I’ve read, quite a lot of naughty stuff that goes on there: illicit marketplaces for guns, drugs, counterfeit money, hackers and worse.
