Deepnet, DarkNet and other similar terms have been featured a lot in the media lately. The most famous is that the hacker group Anonymous took down some sites on DarkNet that were distributing illegal content. This has made many people understandably interested in what Deepnet really is. It is not USENET, which will become obvious as you begin to understand how and why Deepnet or DarkNet exist.
Indexing
You may have heard terms like “search engine optimization,” “SEO,” and “search engine marketing” on your travels around the Web. These are fields related to getting search engines noticed and thus adding those sites to search engine indexes. Actually, it’s a lot of work to get a search engine to notice you; It’s hard to stand out from billions of sites! One of the ways search engines index a site is by following the links from other sites that lead to that.
In the USENET system, the goal of having a newsgroup is for it to be added to as many servers as possible, or at least as many servers for which the newsgroup is relevant. USENET does not require search engine indexing, although Google has an extensive archive of historical USENET publications.
Sometimes sites don’t get indexed at all, and that’s where DarkNet begins.
Not all sinister
When sites are not indexed, it is usually because the webmaster was incompetent in some respect, because he did not put any effort into SEO, or because there was simply no need to index the page. For example, some research projects have websites dedicated to them that are just bibliographies or other material that no one but the participants would be interested in, so there is no point in having those sites indexed at all. The sites end up floating in the ether of the Internet, being of little interest to anyone and never really detected by search engine crawlers. These sites become part of DarkNet.
There are also millions of sites that are started and abandoned by designers and webmasters, usually hobbyists. These sites end up becoming part of DarkNet, particularly when they are on free hosting where they are never removed and where they simply remain forever. Sometimes people bump into them and end up finding interesting resources, sometimes they don’t.
Some DarkNet sites are used for illegal purposes, but there is little chance that you will come across them. Search engines just don’t have them in their indexes, so without typing the URL directly into your browser bar, you won’t find them.
USENET is not part of DarkNet. USENET is transparent and designed to share information, not hide it. It’s also something you buy a subscription to, so finding it is obviously not that difficult. The USENET, however, has a wealth of archived articles and other information that makes it as fascinating as any hidden part of the Internet.