VIDEO: “I Wasn’t Careful Enough on the Deep Web”

The internet has, in its storied history, been compared to many things: a river; a superhighway; and, perhaps most famously, a series of tubes. But as it turns out, the most apt comparison of all just might be an iceberg.

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Like the mighty floes that break off from glaciers, only 10% of the network we call “the internet” is visible to the general public. Hidden below the virtual waterline lies a tangled and secretive network known as the Deep Web.

The Deep Web has a strong appeal to privacy advocates, who have taken advantage of the lack of tracking to shield their anonymity from advertisers and officials alike.

According to Wikipedia, the deep web, invisible web, or hidden web are parts of the World Wide Web whose contents are not indexed by standard search engines for any reason. The content is hidden behind HTML forms.

It is estimated that the deep web makes up 96% of the whole internet. Computer scientist Michael K. Bergman is credited with coining the term deep web in 2001 as a search indexing term.

Since then, the use in the Silk Road’s media reporting, many people and media outlets, have taken to using Deep Web synonymously with the dark web or darknet, a comparison many reject as inaccurate and consequently is an ongoing source of confusion.

Wired reporters Kim Zetter and Andy Greenberg recommend the terms be used in distinct fashions. While the deep web is reference to any site that cannot be accessed through a traditional search engine, the dark web is a small portion of the deep web that has been intentionally hidden and is inaccessible through standard browsers and methods.

In 2001, Michael K. Bergman said how searching on the Internet can be compared to dragging a net across the surface of the ocean: a great deal may be caught in the net, but there is a wealth of information that is deep and therefore missed.

Most of the web’s information is buried far down on sites, and standard search engines do not find it. Traditional search engines cannot see or retrieve content in the deep web. The portion of the web that is indexed by standard search engines is known as the surface web. As of 2001, the deep web was several orders of magnitude larger than the surface web.

“It is impossible to measure, and harsh to put estimates on the size of the deep web because the majority of the information is hidden or locked inside databases. Early estimates suggested that the deep web is 400 to 550 times larger than the surface web.

Estimates based on extrapolations from a study done at University of California, Berkeley in 2001 speculate that the deep web consists of about 7.5 petabytes.

More accurate estimates are available for the number of resources in the deep web: research of He et al. detected around 300,000 deep web sites in the entire web in 2004, and, according to Shestakov, around 14,000 deep web sites existed in the Russian part of the Web in 2006.”