Tech 96% of the Internet Is Hidden; Here's What's on It

Shutterstock

At 3pm on October 1, 2013, the then-29-year-old self-styled entrepreneur and investment advisor Ross Ulbricht was spending an otherwise uneventful afternoon browsing San Francisco’s Glen Park Library. By 3:15pm, he was in FBI custody, accused of running a black market website known as the Silk Road, which had generated more than $1.2 billion in revenue in just two years. How, you ask? Selling heroin, ecstasy, cocaine, and practically every other illegal drug on the planet to over 1 million users via a shadowy, anonymous part of the Internet known as the Deep Web. Okay, not “part” of the Internet -- it’s more like the majority. The Deep Web occupies roughly 96% of the entire Internet, and you can't find any of it using a standard search engine. So what the hell goes on in the deep depths of the Internet that Google can’t show you?

Shutterstock

You probably used it several times today Since the Silk Road bust, the Deep Web has been cast as some nefarious digital wasteland where basement-dwellers go to buy drugs, hire hitmen, and exchange kiddie porn. And sure, that’s not entirely untrue, but there’s plenty more to it than what made headlines. In fact, if you’ve ever checked your bank account online or composed a message in Gmail, you’ve been on the Deep Web. If you think of the Internet as we know it, or the “surface web” -- Google, Wikipedia, this website, and most others you visit every day -- as the Milky Way galaxy, the Deep Web is what makes up the rest of the Internet universe. What's in it? Academic databases, government records, personnel files, internal corporate networks, and your own private accounts protected by a log-in (e.g., your bank account). Plus, a huge chunk of unique URLs containing complex scientific data collected by the likes of NASA that would be indecipherable by you or I.