Tor, known for its anonymizing tool with the same name and Tor Browser, has launched a new search engine. The search engine is called TorSearch, and it is all about letting people find for things without worrying about getting tracked. Unlike any of the other search engines, Google, Bing and Yahoo, the search engine keeps all your interaction anonymous.
Hopping over million users, Tor is a highly trust worthy tool which ensures anonymity. The founder of this TorSearch Chris MacNaughton said,
“I want to be the Google of Tor.”. “Tor is an anonymizing network — for any traffic passing over it, you can’t correlate the start and end points, and websites can’t see who you are.”, he added.
How TorSearch works
When you ping a request, a connection between you and the source website server is established. Tor, on the other hand introduces proxy servers and relay services, which reroute your request through it. This way it makes it hard for anyone, especially, you know who, to intercept the packet (data).
Interestingly, TorSearch too relies on Google spiders to crawl and index the web-pages. The founder explained,
“I’m spidering a hidden wiki, and it links to other hidden services, and they each link out to a few more.”
At the time of writing this post, about 128,250 pages had already been indexed by the search engine.
The search engine has a plain look which definitely is inspired from Google’s. However, there are no separate sections for images, or videos, or blogs just yet. The “Submit a Domain” button at the right bottom can be used to submit your website’s URL, this will help TorSearch add it to their indexing library.
Ever since the NSA stories surfaced, Tor has become extremely popular, and the founder says, there has been a significant spike in the number of users who use Tor. Will TorSearch be able to become the “darknet Google”, that we will leave to you to tell.
The URL of the search engine is weird! You can check it out here.
Isn’t DuckDuckGo anonymous too? 😕
Yes, DuckDuckGo is anonymous too. But certainly its level of anonymity and encryption won’t stand tall against TorSearch.
I do not rely on Google’s spiders to crawl Tor hidden services…
I have my own crawler
DuckDuckGo does also provide a hidden service but it doesn’t index Tor hidden services
My Malwarebytes detects something when I connect to TorSearch…
Just doing some playing around with TorSearch and first off just a search of some common sites I visit does not bring up any relevant sites or the site itself.
Second I just did a search for “nude girls” and what came up was a list of pedophilia sites.
Thanks but no thanks, I’ll stick with DuckDuckgo, BTW, don’t know where you got your facts from, DuckDuckgo is anonymous.
TorSearch, while a good concept still has a VERY long way to go.
This is just weird. AVG and Eset are showing no flags. I think it is just a false alarm.
Yeah, you’re right. It will take some time to grow.
Please correct the statement that goes like this
Unlike any of the other search engines, Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo and Yahoo, the search engine keeps all your interaction anonymous.
to
Unlike any of the other search engines, Google, Bing and Yahoo, the search engine keeps all your interaction anonymous.
because DuckDuckGo keeps your interaction anonymous. Please do not post false information. I recognize that this could be a genuine mistake.
Yeah, I got it wrong with DuckDuckGo. My bad.
Thank you. Much appreciated. 🙂