Onion.city, a search engine which will bring the Dark Web (.)onion sites to your Chrome, IE and Firefox
You may have heard about the .onion urls and Tor anonymiser network but confused about it. ย Some may even have apprehensions about the connection of .onion domains or dark web as its known on the Internet to drugs, child abuse, gunrunning other rackets, so judiciously avoid it.
While the dark web may have these things running aboard but it also has very good things to offer. Especially in heavily censored states and nations Tor and the dark web is a life saver. ย It offers opportunities for people to anonymously browse the cyberworld without fear of snooping.
Some are curious, others are afraid and some just avoid the .onion URL but now Virgil Griffith has gone ahead and brought you a normal search engine called Onion.city which can search the .onion domains on ย dark web and throw up results on your normal browser.
The search engine is powered using Tor2web proxy which enables it to dig deep into the onion domains on Tor anonymiser network and throw up the results to you. The below images which show you what I mean without further ado
Griffith has effectively broken the need for a Tor browser to search for .onion sites but the project is far from complete. As of now Onion.city has indexed approximately 670000 websites according to Google.
Onion.city is powered by Tor2web proxy software which acts as a go-between for the regular web and the Tor network. ย The only discernable difference is that that the results it will throw up will have a .city suffix in addition to the .onion. Using the above image as example, searching for the dark web wiki will show you results with xxxxx.onion.city. Griffith creation is also very fast and comparable with Google.
Once you click on the results thrown up by onion.city you will be shown the .onion domain as a .city subdomain containing full articles of that post.
Griffith’s search engine may raise some eyebrows among the users of dark web as they have chosen the .onion domains because they prefer privacy and onion.city does exactly opposite of what they want, make dark web accessible to normal users using normal browsers.
But leaving aside controversies, Griffith’s onion.city is a nice search engine for those who thought the dark web was something evil and sinister.