Easier to enumerate Tor hidden services than to spider.. <a href="http://freehaven.net/anonbib/cache/oakland2013-trawling.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://freehaven.net/anonbib/cache/oakland2013-trawling.pdf</a>
How long until the NSA/GCHQ backdoors this site, if they haven't already? Would the thought police jump to conclusions if one uses this to search for classified documents? FBI files are probably of no use to me, so I'm not interested in those. But I hate it if people (in particular journalists) are considered to be some kind of al-shabab just for exercising democracy (i.e. holding their governments accountable under the exact letter as well as spirit of applicable legislation).
It doesn't have a lot of .onion websites indexed. The two I tried to find are not in their database (for one of them I got a result though, because it is mentioned in the hidden wiki).<p>I don't see any way of submit a site for crawling.
The problem I see is that you can't really trust a search engine providing links to hidden services. Since hidden services doesn't really use "understandable" domain-names it's very easy to duplicate a website.<p>What is to say the owner(s) of the search engine isn't targeting journalist and the link to the newspaper I found is a dupe of the 'real' site?<p>This is by the way a problem in general with hidden services.
There are already multiple search engines for Tor, including DuckDuckGo.<p>The problem with Hidden services/ TOR isn't search. It's the fact there aren't enough legitimate/trusted websites that appeal to users outside the hardcore privacy/security crowd.<p>edit: fixed Tor capitalization.
Not sure if they promptly rebranded, but the search is called <i>Torch</i> actually. Here's a screen of an example search [1]. Note the query time - it's quite slow.<p>[1] <a href="http://i.imgur.com/4tx4nzt.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://i.imgur.com/4tx4nzt.jpg</a><p>Quick guide to access Torch on the Tor network:<p>1. Install Tor Browser (customized Firefox)
<a href="https://www.torproject.org/projects/torbrowser.html.en" rel="nofollow">https://www.torproject.org/projects/torbrowser.html.en</a><p>2. Extract and run "Start Tor Browser"<p>3. Go to Torch at <a href="http://xmh57jrzrnw6insl.onion" rel="nofollow">http://xmh57jrzrnw6insl.onion</a>