The term Deep Web was coined by the specialist company in indexing 'Bright Planet', and they used it to describe non-indexable content such as requests for dynamic databases, paywalls and other elements difficult to find by using conventional search engines. But later came the case of Silk Road, and the media began to use that term to refer to other elements such as Dark Webs.
Bright Planet has defended many times that the term Deep Web is inaccurate to refer to the Dark Webs and Darknets, but the damage was already done, people had assimilated it and distinguishing these three nomenclatures has become hell. Therefore, today we are going to try to leave these three concepts to know exactly what the differences are and what we mean by them.
In general, to distinguish the concepts of Darknet, Deep Web and Surface Web or superficial web, the iceberg schema is usually used. The tip, the little that stands out on the surface is the web as you know it, the Surface Web. All that is under the water is the Deep Web, and the deepest part of it is that of the Darknets.
But this scheme is too simple, because the Deep Web is something more than the non-indexable in search engines, and next to the Darknet would have to introduce another term such as the Dark Web that usually does not appear. Therefore, let's start by describing one by one each of these four concepts to know how to differentiate them.
The Surface Web is the Internet that you know
The first of the concepts you have to know is that of the Surface Net. Refer to the Internet as most cybernauts know it, that piece of the World Wide Web that anyone can easily access from any browser.
It is a network in which we are easily traceable through our IP. It is composed mainly of pages indexed by conventional search engines such as Google, Bing or Yahoo, but also all those other websites that you can access publicly even without being indexed, such as Facebook, Twitter, and other social networks, as well as any another website or blog.
It is difficult to know its exact size. According to Internet Live Stats, this is made up of more than 1,139 million web pages, while data such as WorldWideWebSize.com indicates that the Internet has more than 4,700 million pages indexed. As it may be, the accessible network still has only a small part of the data that travels through cyberspace.
Deep Web, the depths of the World Wide Web
Just as in general, Clearnet is that portion of the Internet that you can easily access with your browser, we could say that Deep Web is just the opposite. Considering that ~ 90% of the content of the network is not accessible through standard search engines, we are talking about a lot of data.
Also known as Invisible Web (Web Invisible) or Hidden Web (Hidden Web), it includes all that information that is online, but which you can not access publicly. On the one hand, they can be conventional pages that have been protected by a paywall but also files saved in Dropbox or emails stored on the servers of our provider.
The Deep Web is also composed by sites with a "Disallow" in the robots.txt file or dynamic pages that are generated when consulting a database. For example, when you enter a travel portal and search for a hotel in a specific city for a specific day, the page that is created with the results is indexed in no search engine, it is temporary and is part of the Deep Web as banking inquiries and similar inquiries.
Dark Web, the Internet of the deep
Often confused with the Deep Web, although it is part of it, the Dark Web is that fragment of the Internet that can only be accessed through specific applications. Just as Deep Web accounts for around 90% of the content of the World Wide Web, the Dark Web would occupy only 0.1% of it.
Pages like Dictionary.com define it as "the portion of the Internet that is intentionally hidden from search engines, uses masked IP addresses and is accessible only with a special web browser: part of the Deep Web." Therefore, although both are hidden from conventional search engines, the Deep Web is a compilation of everything outside of them, including the Dark Web, which is part of it but is something different.
Mainly the Dark Web is usually formed by pages that have their own domains such as the .onion of TOR or the .i2p of the websites of I2P, but which you can not access unless you have the necessary software to navigate the Darknets in the who are staying.
There is a belief that, since Deep Web is in a certain way the part of the Internet that is not indexed by commercial search engines, the Dark Web cannot be indexed by any of them. But this is not entirely true. Ok, Google will not find access to it, but there are other specific search engines that can be done.
Some are accessible from Clearnet, such as Onion City, capable of indexing thousands of .onion pages. There are also other search engines within the Darknets themselves such as not Evil, Torch or a version of DuckDuckGo also do the same. In addition, other tools such as Onion.to allow access to the TOR Dark Webs by simply adding the .to ending, to the .onion domain, so that the web looks like tupagina.onion.to
Darknets, the independent networks that make up the Dark Web
The term Darknet was coined in 2002 in the document "The Darknet and the Future of Content Distribution" written by Peter Biddle, Paul England, Marcus Peinado and Bryan Willman, four Microsoft researchers. In it, they refer to it as a collection of networks and technologies that could be a revolution when it comes to sharing digital content.
To explain this concept we could say that while Dark Web is all that deliberately hidden content that we find on the Internet, darknets are those specific networks such as TOR or I2P that host those pages. Come on, that although there is only one Internet, the World Wide Web, there are different darknets in their depths hiding the content that makes up the Dark Web.
The best known are the friend-to-friend network Freenet, I2P or Invisible Internet Project with its Eepsites with extension .i2p or ZeroNet with its multiple services. But the most popular of all is TOR, an anonymization network that also has its own Darknet, and is basically what everyone refers to when they talk about them.
Bearing in mind that there is no preset definition for the Darknets, you have to keep in mind that although technically it is something different, in many occasions this same name is usually used to refer to the Dark Web. So do not be scared if you see in the media that refer to one as the other, the important thing is that you finally know how to differentiate from the Deep Web.
Darknet are the hidden networks themselves, while Dark Web can be used to refer two things. On the one hand, the term is used to refer to the content, to the dark webs, while on the other hand it is also used to talk about the culture that implies, a concept that is a bit ambiguous to refer to everything related, and that is so often confused with Deep Web.
Source: http://www.improtecinc.com/deep-web-dark-web-and-darknet-these-are-the-differences/