Dark Web
Sites intentionally not indexed by conventional search engines, often including onion services. Not synonymous with illegal activity — many are legal privacy or news services.
The dark web is the slice of the internet that is deliberately unreachable with a standard browser: sites on overlay networks such as Tor, I2P, or Freenet that require special software and never appear in public DNS or search indexes. On Tor, these are onion services with addresses ending in .onion.
Why it matters
The dark web is where location-hidden publishing lives: whistleblowing platforms like SecureDrop, news outlets’ onion mirrors, forums such as Dread, and the markets covered in this site’s research. Its defining property is architectural — reachability only through the overlay network — not any particular kind of content.
Common mistake
Media coverage routinely conflates the dark web with the much larger deep web (anything unindexed, mostly paywalled or private) and with crime in general. Size estimates are unreliable because onion services do not announce themselves, and measured dark-web traffic is largely mundane. The full distinction is laid out in Deep Web vs Dark Web.
Category: Concepts