Origins of The Internet trace back to a project sponsored by the U.S Defense Advanced Research Agency (DARPA) in 1969, as a way for government researchers to share information (Kahn 2000 cited in Sherman & Price 2001). This was due to the inconvenience that computers in the 60s brought about. They were large, bulky and immobile, thus requiring one to travel to the site of the computer, or send magnetic computer tapes through post (University System of Georgia).

 

Fast forward to the twenty-first century, the World Wide Web of the Internet is an ocean of information readily available at the click of a finger. Search engines such as Google and Yahoo are widely used to find information we need, and the pages that appear to us are indexed websites, which is the surface web, that is less than 1% of the colossal World Wide Web. This was not always the case, as during the Web’s early years, when its content consisted mostly of simple HTML pages, these search engines performed their tasks effectively as they were designed to scour and index Web documents in response to keywords searched (Sherman & Price 2001).

 

Now that the World Wide Web has evolved, and information is available in many other formats besides basic text documents, search engines have not kept up with this shift of the Web and its ability to recognize and index non-text information, which we now refer to as the Deep Web (Sherman & Price 2001 p16). The depth of the Deep Web has multiplied since 2001, and is said to be 400 to 550 larger than the surface web, according to Michael K Bergman’s seminal white paper, and it contains 7,500 terabytes of information compared to nineteen terabytes of information in the surface Web (Bergman 2001).

 

The Deep Web is where databases generate unique pages that do not get surfaced on the indexable web. Standalone pages and documents behind private networks such as academic journal articles, scientific reports, government resources and legal documents are hidden(Anon, 2013) . The deepest part of the World Wide Web is also known as the Dark Web, where users use softwares such as TOR (The Onion Router) and Silk Road for activities that may be illegal, and for private or dissident communication.