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Discussion on: How does the dark web or deep web work?

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mortoray profile image
edA‑qa mort‑ora‑y

I think for the deep web I'd consider any page that a major search engine wouldn't provide unless I already knew the page I was looking for. That is, some pages/sites are known, but will just never appear in search results, unless the person includes a matching title and page name.

The dark web isn't restricting to just TOR. There are other protocols, such as Freenet or I2P. By the nature of the dark web we can also imagine any number of custom protocols used by a limited audience.

Curiously, the dark web need not be part of the deep web -- a search engine could crawl and index things on the TOR network, for example.

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nektro profile image
Meghan (she/her)

On your deep web part, a page like that is one that is most likely excluded from a robots.txt

On your dark web part, sorry about that part. You're right about the other networks, totally skipped my mind when I was writing the comment. Their obscurity make them even more dark it seems.

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cyberfishy profile image
Reed Fisher

I look on the deep web and the dark web just like how astrophysicists talk about dark matter. Dark matter isn't sinister or evil just because of the name, neither are the deep or dark webs inherently evil. There are evil people everywhere using the public web, the deep web, and the dark web. My entire business is on the deep web and of course it is entirely on the up-and-up, a positive and useful thing, open to the public providing your know the URL. It just makes sense to keep Google and Bing out of it.