The size of the internet is hard for most people to wrap their heads around. We have 130 trillion indexed web pages that we can browse, which are only a tiny fraction of the entire thing. This raises the question of what makes up the rest of the internet. Each day new discoveries are being made about that part of the internet people do not know about. This is what shall be referred to as the deep and dark web.
The other side of the internet is called the deep or dark web. What we manage to see via Google is appropriately called the surface web. The deep web is made up of websites that Google cannot crawl or index. You will notice they are password-protected, such as a financial institution’s website. The deep web is 500 times bigger than the surface web. This makes up the largest part of the internet. The dark web, on the other hand, is the tinier part of it. It is also the most unregulated part.
The dark web is where some truly illegal and dark activities happen. The common web browsers cannot get to it. It is where there is no protection for those browsing. To make it through, you need an anonymous browser, lest malware attacks take you down. You can use the Tor browser. You will see different URL extensions apart from the ones you see around. They will not use .com, .net, or .edu, but use .onion.
The browsing experience is slow and looks ancient. Do not expect elaborate graphics in the design, but mostly text. There are innocent as well as not so innocent sites there. There is illegal internet activity on a section of those sites. It may only be a small part as compared to what happens in the surface web, but the magnitude of their effects are far more deadly. This is where products and services such as human organs, uranium, sperm, deadly weapons, professional assassin services sold here. Those are places where law enforcement is still struggling but will not likely get to the bottom of.
The internet infrastructure is made up of billions of devices sending data back and forth. The internet is always storing, communicating, and computing data. There is so much data handled, you can imagine how large it is. The internet is believed to contain up to 1 million exabytes of data, which is a quintillion byte of data. The figure is so large you need time to think of it. It also generated 1.1 zettabytes of traffic per year. A zettabyte represents one trillion gigabytes.
These parts of the whole show you just how large an entity it is we are dealing with. There is a lot we shall learn more about the internet. You shall discover more about it when you log into this site.
