What Is The Dark Web?

The name conjures up a Satanic or pagan ritual in a forest at the summer solstice or some type of unholy alliance of dangerous people. It's actually all of that and none of that. The dark web was created by the US Navy Department.  But before we talk about the dark web we'll have to first explain how the regular web works.

On the regular web, you have search engines like Google, Yahoo, or Bing, and they search the web looking for information and catalog that information. They use a software device that's called a spider, which basically crawls the web and indexes information. It also uses some level of artificial intelligence to organize information. On the regular web, the URL of the website has a back qualify either org, com, mil, edu, or net.

On the dark web, the last qualifier is onion, but that is not the only difference. If you have a website and you don't want it to be cataloged by the regular web spider, you put in a message in a file called robots.text.  In this message, you spell out what you dont want to be cataloged by normal spiders used by search engines. 

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You can also use the robot text on a regular website if you don't want it to be cataloged by the search engines but it will not necessarily become part of the official dark web. This is done for  the Deep Web which again is not indexed by normal search engines and again utilizes the robot.txt file to exclude information from search engines.

On the dark web you have to use a special type of web browser called the Tor browser. At the end of the article, I will give a link if you want to download the TOR browser so you'll be able to search the dark web by yourself.  The Tor browser is sometimes just called The Onion Browser(router).

The dark web works through a series of proxy websites that a group of volunteers supervises and organize. This network of volunteers is the human backbone of the dark web. When your request is handled by these websites(servers) it is encrypted, and your origin (ip address) is obfuscated. This is to help you preserve your anonymity on the internet. 

Below I have a diagram of how the dark web bounces from proxy servicer to proxy server. 

One thing that should be obvious at first is that as you're bouncing from service to server on the dark web it's going to take longer for you to retrieve the information that you searched for. And that information is going to be bounced back to you from a number of servers. If you have a  very slow internet connection you could wait quite some time for a result.

Below I have search results for “ransomware” from the dark web. You can see the end  Qualifier is onion. Notice that the search for ransomware also brings up adult forums and c**** pornography, rape, and incest. This is just the tip of the iceberg of depravity on the dark web.

Is it legal to go into the dark web? Yes, absolutely, however, if you are involved in any type of criminal activity and the police or FBI do seize your laptop, they will look in the tour browser history and see where you've been and whether or not you've been involved in illegal activities on the dark web. 

Tor browser link:
https://www.torproject.org/
Happy Browsing.