In March 2000, an Irish student, Ian Clarke, developed Freenet to enable anonymous communication online via a decentralized network; the modern dark web arose from his innovation.
What is the dark web?
The dark web is World Wide Web content existing on dark nets and requires a specialized web browser, software, configurations, unique tool, or authorization for accessibility. You use the dark web for privacy and anonymity when online.
Since owners and users of the dark web are anonymous, their activities can be legitimate or illegitimate. As a small part of the deep web, operators of the dark web keep it hidden on purpose.
Is it illegal to go on the dark web?
One can’t outrightly say that the dark web is illegal; some people use it to evade government censorship and restriction, but there have been reports of using it for highly illegitimate and nefarious activities. Some activities people use the dark web for are black markets, malware vendors, narcotics, hacker forums, firearms, and buying and selling stolen credit cards.
You can’t rule out using the dark web for promoting child pornography, human trafficking, and hiring of hitmen. One reason you can’t look at the dark web as completely illegal is it can be a blog, forum, private gaming server, or chat room that wants to be anonymous.
Operating on the dark web means you are anonymous; in the real world, you don’t know who is targeting you; governments, hackers, and corporations want to have all information about your online activities, either for good or bad. Once you don’t use the black web for nefarious activities, we can conclude that it’s not bad.
Why is the dark web not on Google?
The reason the dark web is not on Google is the inability to discover or display results for pages within the dark web. You need Tor to access the vast majority of the dark web.
To access the dark web, you need the top-level domain “.onion,” while Google uses “.com” or “.org.” Tor is a secure network; users are anonymous due to encryption and traffic bouncing between relays located all over the globe.
Unlike the Chrome browser, the Tor Browser lets you surf the dark and clear web.
How many people use the dark web?
Around two and a half million people visit the dark web daily, though the number has increased to roughly 2.7 million by mid-April 2023. The figure represents about 6.7% of the global population; several users engage in illicit activities such as sharing malware, distributing child pornography, human trafficking, cybercrime, or selling illegal substances and weapons.
The deep web may sound mysterious to many people, which should not be the case since it makes up over 90% of the internet. Any publicly available website falls into the surface web and is indexed readily by search engines.
On the other hand, the deep web, where the dark web is about .01%, is any page that search engines such as Google do not crawl and index.
