The vocabulary, straightened out
Dark web, deep web, and Tor get used as synonyms. They are not, and the confusion produces genuinely bad advice.
Terminology pedantry is usually a waste of everyone's time. Here it is not, because the confused terms lead people to install the wrong software, trust the wrong intermediary, and misjudge what protects them.
The distinctions
Deep web means anything not indexed by search engines. Your bank statements, a company intranet, the contents of any database behind a login. It is most of the internet by volume and it is entirely mundane. It has nothing to do with anonymity and the word appears in this space almost entirely by mistake.
Dark web is a media coinage for services reachable only through an anonymity network. It is not a place, has no boundary, and is not a network. Nothing technical corresponds to it, which is why the term is useless for describing how anything works.
Tor is a specific piece of software and a specific network of relays. Hidden services are addresses reachable only through it. This is the only term in the set that names something with defined behaviour, and it is the one to use when you want to be understood.
Why the sloppiness costs something
Because advice inherits the vagueness of the terms it uses, and vague advice about anonymity is worse than none.
- Dark web browsers. There is no such category. Software marketed this way is either Tor Browser repackaged, usually with something added, or it is not providing the protection its name implies. The term creates a product category that should not exist and malware fills it.
- Dark web VPNs. A VPN and Tor solve different problems. Marketing that blurs the terms sells the first as though it did the job of the second, and users end up believing they have protection they do not have.
- Onion gateways. Sites that let you open onion addresses without Tor. They work by making the request themselves, which means they see everything, including credentials. They exist because people think of the dark web as a place they need a door into, rather than as a network they need the right client for.
- Dark web scans. Sold as though somewhere could be comprehensively searched. There is no index to search, which is the defining property of the thing being described.
The useful mental model
Not a place you enter, but a way of routing. Tor moves your traffic through several relays so that no single one knows both where it came from and where it went, and hidden services extend that so the destination is protected the same way. Everything else follows from that mechanism.
Someone holding the routing model asks better questions. Not is this site on the dark web, which is meaningless, but who can see this request, what does the destination learn about me, and what am I trusting in the middle. Those questions have answers, and the answers are what actually determine whether a given action is safe.
How we use the terms
This site uses Tor and hidden service when describing mechanisms, because those are the words that mean something. Dark web appears in page titles because that is what people search for, and refusing to use a term readers use helps nobody. That is a compromise between accuracy and being findable, and this paragraph is us being upfront about making it.
Verified working Nexus Market mirrors
Three v3 onion addresses currently serving the production market, signed under PGP fingerprint 0x7F2A0A9D. Use the Copy buttons.