Have you heard of the dark web? Most likely. That’s a nice, scary, edgy little term, isn’t it? Ooo dark, ooo mysterious. You won’t find it on the “surface web” – sites you find through Google (or Bing, or Ecosia, etc.). It’s different, intriguing, it feels a bit illegal, and sometimes it can be dangerous. As urban exploration, or something. The dark web refers to a part of the internet that does not register (or has not been indexed, to be technical) on search engines.
There are quite a few layers in the “black canvas. They begin with what we would call the “Deep Web”, which consists of web pages and sites that require a password or other security measures. This may be an academic site, a collection of government documents, or other archives, documents, and databases that the general public does not have access to.
Then you enter the dark web you were thinking of when you clicked on this article. People like to say it represents “96% Internet », but really, we can’t be sure. It’s a bit like the mysterious depths of the sea that we still know nothing about. There are also conspiracies about the various deepest and darkest parts of the web that very, very few people have ever accessed. They need something called quantum computing to get in, which is very complicated and not too relevant to understanding the basics of the dark web. What do you need to know? Glad you asked…
