# Dark Web The **dark web** is the portion of the internet reachable only through anonymizing overlay networks — overwhelmingly [[Tor]], whose hidden services resolve to .onion addresses that conventional browsers and search engines cannot reach and whose hosting location is concealed from visitors. It is a small subset of the "deep web," which merely means anything not indexed by search engines, and the two terms are routinely and unhelpfully conflated in press coverage. The technology is neutral and its funding origins are governmental: onion routing was developed at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory to protect intelligence and dissident communications, and journalists, whistleblower submission systems, and users under censorship regimes remain significant constituencies. The same properties support illicit markets, of which **Silk Road** was the first at scale and [[AlphaBay]] the largest of its successors. Blockchain forensics firms such as [[Chainalysis]] have since made the [[Bitcoin]] payment layer far more traceable than its early users assumed, which is why later enforcement actions have tended to run through the money rather than the network. > [!note] Stub > Spine stub. Expand: onion services architecture, the major market takedowns, deanonymization techniques and their legal contestation, and the policy debate over anonymity infrastructure.