A few days ago a new search engine DarkSearch for Tor launched, adding to the mix of other existing search engines out there like Ahmia, Torch, Not Evil, and Haystack – it’s time for a feature comparison!
No search engine can cover 100% of the pages due to the nature of Tor. There is no central .onion repository so the first challenge is to find the .onion links. Other challenges when running a search engine include data size (and associated storage and processing power), data formats, and many smaller challenges like depth of crawling (i.e. how many sub-pages, how to behave when there are infinite sup-pages).
The following graph shows our index of Tor (dark blue) and I2P (light blue). As of April 2019, we have 10,197,379 items indexed for Tor and 1,557,915 items for I2P. An item can be any supported file format – including HTML, text, PDF, office documents (Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files), and since yesterday, even eBooks.
We have 2,250,020 .onion addresses in our index, although only a small fraction is actually active. For I2P our index has 3,565 .i2p domains listed.
September 2019: Latest Updates We have two new major features to share: the Tree View and the History tabs. 📂 Tree View The Tree View tab shows related items to a search result. It simplifies the process of discovery and adds context to the search results. As for website results, it will show all other
We just released a major update – virtual folders. For some results, there is a new “Tree View” tab. It shows items that are related either because they are part of one container file, or because the original file was too big and was automatically split into multiple files. To put it simple, the Tree
One of the file formats that does not get much attention are “.DS_Store” files, even though they might be of interest in forensic cases when analyzing hard disks or other folders (including ZIP files) from Mac machines. “.DS_Store” is an abbreviation for “Desktop Services Store”. These files are created automatically by Apples “Finder” software (which