Although they are two separate sites, we list them together because while we examined them, we discovered their onion database is identical – in other words, each query we ran retrieved the same numbers of results – featuring the exact same content.Īhmia was founded by cybersecurity researcher Juha Nurmi who has experience in working with the private sector and government projects. Torch and Ahmia are two separate search engines – both are considered popular, established search engines in the dark web community that provides access to valuable content. Top dark search engines – reviewed Torch/Ahima Now let’s review each of the top 7 dark web search engines. Indexed pages (estimate according to the site statistics) A quick overview of the top dark web search engines Search engine For short reviews of each of the search engines, scroll down. The comparison is based on different features and capabilities. Let’s first have a quick overview (see the table below) for a quick comparison between all the different search engines we examined. What are the top 7 dark web search engines? This wasn’t an easy task because most of them are outdated and only index few sites.īut we found 7 search engines with relevant results. We have carried out extensive research to find valid and updated search engines that are active. Searching through forums for these links is a real challenge, as the information is scattered between different forums that can be difficult to access.Īnother way to find dark web sites is by using dark web search engines. The most common way today to access dark web (onion) sites is to obtain links to their domains through directories and forums, where users and admins share links to the sites.īut often these directories are not up-to-date because dark web sites constantly change their URLs. But it has also attracted a wide range of criminals. It has been widely used by the military, government, and even journalists who looked for a private, safe space to communicate (even before end-to-end encrypted instant messaging platforms, such as Signal and Telegram, had emerged). And the main factor that separates it from the open web is the need for anonymity.

This part of the web is known as the dark web or the darknet. None of the deep and dark web sites are indexed by DuckDuckGo, the official search engine of the Tor browser. But most of the web is not indexed by these search engines. When online users think of the web, they usually think about the open web, sites that are indexed by mainstream search engines such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo.

Tor dark web search