DarkSearch is publicly working dark web search engine to find websites on dark web. Using this search engine, you can search for onion websites and then visit their corresponding landing pages. This is a simple search engine like others but specifically for dark web. You can search content by keywords and it shows results like you see in other search engines. On top of that, it provides its API as well. You can use API to make calls and retrieve search results for a particular keyword in JSON format. So, if you want to add dark search functionality in your desktop or web applications then you can do that.
Dark Web is the other face of the internet. It is hidden from public use for certain other reasons. The websites on dark web are not indexed by generic search engines like Bing or Google. Websites on dark net have “.onion” in their domain and the site name can be any arbitrary string. Although misuse of dark net is illegal in any form but there are certain advantage of dark web as well and biggest of them all is privacy.
Some secret agencies and journalists host their sites on dark net in order to expose information which they can’t broadcast openly. Similarly, there are some blogs and wiki pages as well. But to remember every kink of the website is difficult which is why a search engine is needed for that. There are some search engines available for dark web already but they keep going down and getting up. But this one is pretty good and you will like it.
Using DarkSearch to Search Dark Web:
To use dark web, you need to use Tor browser. So, download Tor browser if you don’t already have it. Next, open it and then go to the homepage of DarkSearch and you will notice that its interface is similar to other search engines. This can also be seen in the screenshot above.
Now, you enter any keyword there and enter. It will start pulling up results and you can click on anyone of them. In the search results, you will notice all the websites that it pulls have “.onion” in their URLs. Also, the domain name of those website consist of a random text string. This is how websites on dark web look like.
Other nice feature of this search engine is that it provides its API. Currently, you don’t need any API key in order to make requests. However, currently there is limit of 30 requests per minutes. This is to keep the spammers away from abusing the API. And if you exceed the permitted limit then you will receive 429 error code and it can even ban you. You can see the syntax of the API call below.
Syntax: https://darksearch.io/api/search?query=Serach_Keyword/Phrase
Example: https://darksearch.io/api/search?query=news
You can see the JSON response that the API returns in the screenshot above. Use this search engine in this way to quickly get list of websites on dark web by just some input search keywords or queries. If you have used some APIs before then it will be easy for you to make calls and parse the response JSON data.
Final thoughts
If you are looking for a search engine for dark web then you will like the search engine I have mentioned. There is no sign up or complicated process to use it. I will suggest you to use it over Tor and find what you want from dark web. Also, do note that the load time of the website that it finds completely depends on how the website is hosted.
