Dark Web - Boon or Bane

The World Wide Web is part of the Internet that provides a way for people to disseminate information. Web content is crawled and indexed by search engines so that it can be retrieved, ranked, and displayed as a user's search results. This content is easily accessible from web browsers and search engines and constitutes the surface web. Information that cannot be crawled by search engine crawlers is classified as Deep Web. Deep web content does not appear in the results displayed by search engines. This part of the web remains hidden, but can be accessed with a targeted search using a regular web browser. Unlike the Deep Web, the World Wide Web has some parts that cannot be accessed without special software. This is known as the dark web. This chapter describes the differences between the dark web and the deep web, and the software commonly used to access the dark web. It highlights the illegal and legitimate aspects of the dark web and identifies the role cryptocurrencies play in expanding the dark web's user base.