Search engines

Tor Browser greets us with the built-in DuckDuckGo search engine. From the point of view of privacy, it is an excellent choice, but it is looking for DDG exclusively on the open Internet, so it will not be useful in our research.

DuckDuckGo, hello!

However, there are almost more search engines in the darknet than in the clearnet. Among the most popular: Ahmia, Candle and Torch. There were also good search engines called Grams and Fess, but for unknown reasons they are currently unavailable. Each of them gives different results for the same queries, so it’s better to bookmark all three resources.

INFO

In this article, we will focus on what is available in .onion, so if you want to follow the links, then you will need Tor Browser.

I usually use Candle first — it’s not the most famous search engine, but there are no ads for third-party resources on it and the relevance of the results, according to my feelings, is higher than that of the same Torch. On the other hand, even irrelevant links are sometimes interesting.

Torch, as its name foreshadows, constantly provides links to resources related to drug trafficking. He also doesn’t understand Cyrillic at all and has managed to ruin his reputation by advertising the most dubious sites.

Torch: is there everything?

The Ahmia search engine is different in that it is available both in the darknet and in the clearnet. The relevance of the issue is (subjectively) not very high: like Torch, it often gives out links that are not related to the search topic in any way.

However, if we decided to explore the mysterious world of the darknet, then search engines will help here poorly — too few resources are available for indexing. Sometimes the search engine can even lead to the wrong place by giving a link to a fake project.