Four Dark Web search engines you can trust

It’s often best to think of the internet as an ocean.

There’s a surface which is clearly visible from anywhere – in this case, the indexed webpages and resources with www prefixes, accessible through search engines like Google and Bing.

Then there’s the deep web below the surface – the databases, files and coding which are visible but not immediately accessible, helping to keep the surface web in place.

You can’t see draft webpages, product databases or firewalled content unless you log in. It’s still part of the internet, but it’s only accessible to people with appropriate credentials.

Below the deep web lies the Dark Web – invisible from the surface, but there all the same, containing a great deal of strange and frightening content.

Like the depths of an ocean, the Dark Web isn’t reachable without specialist equipment. It’s metaphorically dark, and the fainthearted certainly shouldn’t explore it.

Yet the Dark Web does host a great deal of unique content, often appealing to fringe audiences and opponents of censorship.

Little wonder that the Tor Browser used to view and interact with the Dark Web has always received generous funding from the American government, as a bastion of internet freedom.

It’s particularly good for mirror sites – Dark Web versions of legitimate press or social media platforms, designed to be accessed by people in countries where those outlets are banned.

Beyond the pale

Some would argue today’s overly censorious, fearful and self-righteous culture means a truly uncensored internet is more important than it was during periods of looser state regulation.

The Dark Web is beloved by journalists, researchers, white hat hackers (and their less ethical cousins) and businesses who accept payments in cryptocurrency.

Yet because the Dark Web is specifically designed not to be indexed and ranked in the way surface websites are, finding your way around is difficult.

Its .onion address suffixes are named after onion routing, where web traffic is wrapped up in layers of encryption before being bounced around the world through various network nodes.

Even the names are challenging.

Instead of bbc.co.uk or broadbanddeals.co.uk, you might see a website address comprising up to 56 random alphanumeric characters, which would be impractical to type in manually.

So how do you navigate down in the depths, beyond the reach of familiar search engines like Google?

Dedicated Dark Web search engines do exist, though their reach isn’t always as comprehensive as you’d hope.

Nonetheless, these engines should help you to explore the dark web safely.

We’ve excluded DuckDuckGo – despite being the default search engine built into the Tor browser, it struggles to locate .onion websites and is more geared to surface web results.

1. Ahmia. Built with support from the Tor Project (who operate the browser), Ahmia removes abusive content and will offer support in response to trigger word searches.

2. Torch. Torch takes a less research-centric approach than Ahmia, listing mirror sites and low-value results alongside a comprehensive assortment of reliable web links.

3. Onionland. Offering a blend of surface, Dark Web and image search functionality, Onionland’s interface resembles a simpler Google, right down to autocompleted suggestions.

4. DeepSearch. Where other engines focus on quantity, DeepSearch prioritises accuracy. There may not be many results, especially among newer sites, but they’ll be relevant and low spam.

When using any Dark Web search engine, we’d recommend disabling automatic downloads and refusing to approve any such requests.

It’s also advisable to disable JavaScript through Tor, since it can be used to track activity and may be susceptible to malware. The Excavator search tool excludes Java-enabled results.

If you truly want to be anonymous online (as opposed to being Anonymous), run Tor connection through a VPN. It’ll run slowly, but it’ll be near-impossible to track.

Finally, be aware that many of these engines are basic and some don’t allow dedicated image searches – if they display results at all.

In testing for this article, DarkSearch struggled to find results, while another well-known Dark Web search engine wouldn’t even load, despite entering two different .onion URLs.

Dependability isn’t a given down here in the depths.