The Deep Web

4% of the web comprise the internet us normal rubes are used to, the web accessible via Safari, Explorer, Chrome and Opera, among significant others, to do our usual thing whether it be email trolling, social networking a la Facebook or Google + or buying stuff from Amazon and Apple but  the other 96%, the dark side of the web, can only be seen via browsers like Tor, a tool allowing us to see the mysterious and illegal though the mechanism of anonymity and tech, courtesy the US Navy.

Inception

Tor was originally designed, implemented, and deployed as a third-generation onion routing project of the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory. It was originally developed with the U.S. Navy in mind, for the primary purpose of protecting government communications. Today, it is used every day for a wide variety of purposes by normal people, the military, journalists, law enforcement officers, activists, and many others.

Overview

Tor is a network of virtual tunnels that allows people and groups to improve their privacy and security on the Internet. It also enables software developers to create new communication tools with built-in privacy features. Tor provides the foundation for a range of applications that allow organizations and individuals to share information over public networks without compromising their privacy.

Seen below is a pretty cool graphic doing the iceberg thing showing just how vast the deep web truly is.

The ‘Surface Web’, also known as the ‘Visible’ or ‘Searchable’ web, while significantly large at over 8 billion pages, only cracks the surface when it comes to the size of the Internet.  The ‘Deep Web’, (also known as the ‘Invisible Web’, ‘Deepnet’, ‘DarkNet’, ‘Hidden Web’ and ‘Undernet’) refers to the content on the Internet that is not capable of being indexed by standard search engines, leaving the content ‘hidden’. The Deep Web houses over 96% of the content on the web that is publicly accessible.

According to CompletePlanet:

• Public information on the Deep Web is currently 400 to 550 times larger than the commonly defined World Wide Web.
• The Deep Web contains 7,500 terabytes of information, compared to 19 terabytes of information in the surface Web.
• The Deep Web contains nearly 550 billion individual documents compared to the 1 billion of the surface Web.
• More than an estimated 200,000 Deep Web sites presently exist. Sixty of the largest Deep Web sites collectively contain about 750 terabytes of information – sufficient by themselves to exceed the size of the surface Web by 40 times.

Interesting to say the least.