Deep web is this thing that people have loved to throw out the past couple of years as this sinister, dark, unregistered web full of hackers, criminals, and various unsavory people. This is pretty much wrong. The deep web, called that because it is like the part of the iceberg that sits below the surface of the water, is simply parts of the web that are not cataloged, nothing else. In the beginning everything was deep web, and yes, it was a mess. It was horrible trying to find anything. The main way we got around was that if someone had a sight that they wanted the general public to be able to access they would post it on Usenet. This was about the closest thing there was to cataloging. Often to find information you would look through Usenet to find a page related to what you were looking for and then walk from one link to another, through the snow, up hill, both ways. This didn't really last too long. People pretty quickly started making intelligent agents that could start at a page, grab everything on that page and look for keywords, find any links, follow those links to their pages, grab everything on them and look for keywords, etc. That quickly gave way to web searches which were pretty much the same thing. The only real difference between a web search and an intelligent agent was that the web search computers we dedicated to the job with much more bandwidth and storage, so eventually intelligent agents pretty much died out because they were out competed. Digital evolution in action. 99.99% of the "deep web" is garbage. The stuff on it has been uncatalogued because there's no reason to catalog it. As an example, assume I pay a web hosting company a small fee, $20 a month. For that $20 I get 50 GB of storage and 100 GB of data transfer per month (I don't know what the going rates are. These are just numbers I'm pulling out of the ether). I go ahead and also spend $50 a year to register a domain with ICANN called 'all-hail-psinautiloid.org'. I can use those 50 GB to throw up a Wordpress blog, a phpGedView site, and an UberGallery site. I decided to do this because I am in complete control of all my data and don't need to worry that Ancestry.com is going to sell my family tree data to telemarketers or that Google is going to be mining my blog like they might do with Google+. I also do this because I get the snappy homepage of 'www.all-hail-psinautiloid.org'. If the company I'm currently using shuts down, changes their rules, or I just find a new company that I prefer working with because they are cheaper I can easily move my data to the new company, contact ICANN and keep right on running. All of this data is, at least initially, deep web. Until Google or Bing or someone else sees a that points them to 'www.all-hail-psinautiloid.org' none of that data will be cataloged, and that's all the deep web is. There's nothing sinister about my family tree (well, except for the fact that we're members of the reptiloid race that secretly rules Earth) or my blog outlining my plans for world domination or the photos of my vacation to Area 51. They are just mundane, uncatalogued data. Things like Silk Road aren't really deep web. All of the items for sale are cataloged. Maybe not by Google but that's only because they are always changing. Saying that items listed on Silk Road are deep web because Google doesn't list them is like saying that an item that's on Etsy is deep web because Google doesn't list it. Illegal good and services being offered for sale pretty much have to be cataloged (and thus are not deep web) because really, what's the point in offering something for sale if no one can find it to buy it? Now there is a whole separate aspect to the internet that allows criminals to do things while trying to hide who they are. You've got cryptocurrencies and anonymizers, TOR and Onion services (all of which also have perfectly legitimate uses) but that's a completely separate issue. That's not the deep web at all. Why am I getting worked up about this? Because one of the things that I really, really love about EP is that overall it gets computers and the internet (or the mesh) right. It doesn't have people hacking systems by shooting VR guns at VR dragons guarding at VR castle. It doesn't have people get trapped in the Mesh because someone shut off their connection and they were unable to 'get back' to their brain. You don't hack someone's password by guessing it was the name of their ex-girlfriend. It is a very 'real' system, so I try to keep people from veering away from it too much. (One quick edit. At this very moment this posting could be viewed to be part of the deep web. In the next few days Google and other search services will get around to indexing it and adding it, but until then there is only a single computer on the planet indexing this post, and that's the EP forums).