In some of my past posts, I’ve mentioned that there are a few search engines on Tor that you can use to find .onion links. These vary greatly in quality, but the main search engine that people seem to use is called “not Evil”: http://hss3uro2hsxfogfq.onion – in previous posts, I’ve referred to it as the “Google of Tor.”

Beyond not Evil, there’s also Candle, Ahmia, TORCH, and (of course) Grams. In a much earlier post, I interviewed the creator of Candle: A Chat With Jobi – Creator of Candle Search Engine.

One of the differences with Candle is that it gets far fewer results – however, Jobi stated in the interview that he focused on getting more accurate results, rather than the largest number. TORCH gets a reasonable number of results, but in my experience, they aren’t always accurate.

Ahmia, on the other hand, gets results on its search engine results page (SERP) that are usually quite accurate, but like Candle, it doesn’t return a large number. One of the things I like about Ahmia is that if the results include something like CP, you can report it and they’ll exclude it from future searches. The same goes for not Evil.

Where is the Darkest Search?

So what other search engines exist? Well, one of the link sites I like, called Welcome to Dark Web Links and More, added a search engine to their features. While it doesn’t get as many results as not Evil does, it’s interesting to compare the two and see if they come up with anything different.

The actual search engine is located at http://bznjtqphs2lp4xdd.onion, and seems to index onion sites differently than the other search engines, although I couldn’t tell you exactly how the algorithms work. If anyone has a link to a repository for this search engine, I would be curious to find out some more!

One difference I’ve noticed between the WTDWLAM search engine and others is that it has an option called “View This Link with Proxy Redirection For Added Security.” Given that I don’t always trust proxies, because you don’t know who’s spying on your traffic, I hesitate to use this one. Plus, it’s Tor, for God’s sake – why would you need extra security?

Read this WIRED article for more info: Proxy Services Are Not Safe. Try These Alternatives.

Anyhow, I did a few searches with the WTDWLAM search engine, and got quite a few results, although they weren’t always accurate, but that’s to be expected. If you search for the string “red room,” you get 567 results! Are there really 567 red rooms? (Well…no.)

This might be a fun experiment to play around with, and see what mysterious sites you can find. Hint: they probably won’t be much different than the ones you’ve found before.

On the other hand, if you do find anything cool, let me know in the comments!

(Just don’t spam me, OK? Or spam me. I don’t really care.)