Every day, two million people, like Alice through the Looking Glass, switch from the usual Internet to the darknet. What are they looking for there?
Let’s start with the term.
For the first time, the darknet (dark web) was mentioned in the 70s. The usual Internet did not exist then, but university networks designed by the Pentagon were already working in the United States. So, the “dark” ones were called those to which there was no access from large networks. And the third-party user didn’t know what was going on there.
Now the entire Internet can be compared to a three-layer ocean. The first network is surface (Surface Web). This is the usual Internet, which allows you to get information like a fish net, that is, with the help of ordinary search engines. Next is the Deep Web. Libraries, closed Instagram accounts, closed chats – in general, everything that is not indexed by search engines. There is much more information here than in the upper layer. And finally, Darknet (Dark Web) – sites that can be seen only with the help of special browsers. The most popular is Tor.
By the way, there are not so many “dark” sites. In 2016, there were 170 million resources in the world, of which 2.5 thousand were “black”. And so far, this figure has practically not grown. Another thing is that these sites are not indexed, and it is difficult to figure out what is going on there at all.