But that doesn’t mean that accessing that personal information has no risks.įor instance, your accounts on the deep web contain a lot of your personal information that criminals might value. You probably check your email and your credit card statements online without worry. More on that later.Īccessing content on the deep web is relatively safe. Dark web websites are often associated with illegal activity - but not all of them. The dark web represents a sliver of the deep web. The deep web is a pretty safe place, especially when you compare it with the dark web. The deep web can help protect your personal information and privacy. Content contained within scientific and academic databasesĪ lot of what exists on the deep web consists of information that you probably wouldn’t want to turn up in a web search - like your checking account information - because it’s private and could be misused.Ī rule of thumb: If you have to log in to one of your accounts by providing a user name, password, or some other type of authentication, the information you access is on the deep web.Data that companies store on their private databases.The content of your online banking accounts.The content of your social media accounts.The content of your personal email accounts.Here are a few examples of what’s on the deep web: The deep web holds the content that’s invisible to search engines. Almost every time you search internally on a website, you’re accessing deep web content. This kind of information is all over the internet.

Instead, you would have to go to the public library’s website and use a search bar inside the website to locate this data on the library’s servers. (Search engines crawl the internet by visiting one web page, then the links on that page, and then the links on subsequent pages.) The reason search engines can’t return this data to you is because there are no links. That level of information would be located in the deep web. Regular browsers search the so-called “surface web,” but that’s where the search stops.įor instance, if you wanted to search a public library catalog to find a book, you couldn’t type the title into your browser’s search bar and expect Google to return a meaningful result for your library. They use links to rank search results according to things like relevancy, inbound links, and keywords. Search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo are able to search and index websites because of links. The deep web is just like it sounds - below the surface and not completely dark.

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