What is Deep Web? How it Works?

Deep web is also known as invisible or hidden web. It is a part of World Wide Web that consists of sites which are hidden and need special browsers access. In other words, whatever we can easily access on Internet is only a small part of a much larger digital space called the deep web. For example, online bank accounts, email, drop-box accounts, password-protected information, are all sorts of content present inside deep web and are not immediately accessible through search engines.

What prevents users from easy access to such Information?

Methods which prevent web pages from being easily accessed by traditional search engines are as follows:

• Contextual Web: This helps in optimizing web-based search results based on context provided by the user and the system being used for the query.
• Dynamic content: It is supported by applications and scripts running on the server hosting the website, such that it shows different content every time one visits the web page. When we submit a query, it returns a dynamic page with coded information, which is generally not possible to understand.
• Limited access content: There are sites that limit access to their pages in a technical way. For example, by using Robots Exclusion Standard or CAPTCHAs, or no-store directive that prohibits search engines from browsing them.
• Non-HTML/text content: Textual content encoded in multimedia such as image or video files or specific file formats are not handled by search engines.
• Private Web: There are sites that are password protected and require registration or login to access the content.
• Scripted content: Certain web pages are only accessible through links produced by JavaScript as well as facilitate the content to be dynamically downloaded from Web servers.
• Software: Web also has content that is intentionally hidden from the regular Internet, and accessible only with special darknet software.
• Unlinked content: It includes pages which are not linked to other pages, which may prevent web crawling programs from accessing the content.
• Web archives: Web archival services enables users to see archived versions of web pages across time, though they are not easily accessible by search engines such as Google.

The contents of deep web are not indexed by the search engines used and is hidden behind HTML forms, In our day to day life a common person accesses something called the ‘Surface Web; which is on the opposite side of the scale when compared to deep web.

Working of Deep Web

The working of the deep web takes place outside the purview of surface web. A person cannot access the deep web using the normal search engines as the pages on the deep web are not indexed. The deep web works using the Onion Router which is also known as ‘Tor’ One needs to download and install Tor. Tor is a software which installs and sets up a specific connection which is required to access deep web. Tor is basically an encrypted technology which enables the users to hide their identity and prevent snooping on their activities. Thus it is a perfect place for criminals to grow. The servers of Tor aren’t at a single place but spread all across the globe and thus it is very difficult to tract anyone. The domains used in the deep web aren’t .com, .in, .org etc but have domain names which end in .onion. The end users IP address bounces through several layers of encryption and thus changes its location too often. The higher the number of layers involved greater is the secrecy and anonymity of the users. Website in the deep web is just like other websites on the surface web but it is very difficult to ascertain the creator of that website and for what purposes it is being used other than the displayed information.