Ahmia is a clearnet

search engine A search engine is a software system designed to carry out web searches. They search the World Wide Web in a systematic way for particular information specified in a textual web search query. The search results are generally presented in a ...

for Tor's hidden services created by Juha Nurmi.

Overview

Developed during the 2014 Google Summer of Code with support from the

Tor Project Tor, short for The Onion Router, is free and open-source software for enabling anonymous communication. It directs Internet traffic through a free, worldwide, volunteer overlay network, consisting of more than seven thousand relays, to conc ...

, the

open source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized so ...

search engine was initially built in Django and PostgreSQL. It collects the peculiar anonymous identifier called .onion URLs from the Tor network and feeds these to its index except those containing a robots.txt file. The search engine filters out

child pornography Child pornography (also called CP, child sexual abuse material, CSAM, child porn, or kiddie porn) is pornography that unlawfully exploits children for sexual stimulation. It may be produced with the direct involvement or sexual assault of a ...

and keeps a blacklist of abusive services. The service partners with

GlobaLeaks GlobaLeaks is an open-source, free software intended to enable secure and anonymous whistleblowing initiatives. History The project started on 15 December 2010 and the first software prototype was announced on 6 September 2011. Relevant figure ...

's submissions and Tor2web statistics for hidden service discovery and as of July 2015 has indexed about 5000 sites. Ahmia is also affiliated with Hermes Center for Transparency and Digital Rights, an organization that promotes transparency and freedom-enabling technologies. In July 2015 the site published a list of hundreds of fraudulent fake versions of web pages (including such sites as

DuckDuckGo DuckDuckGo (DDG) is an internet search engine that emphasizes protecting searchers' privacy and avoiding the filter bubble of personalized search results. DuckDuckGo does not show search results from content farms. It uses various APIs o ...

, as well a dark web page). According to Nurmi, "someone runs a fake site on a similar address to the original one and tries to fool people with that" with the intent of scamming people (e.g. gathering bitcoin money by spoofing bitcoin addresses). The background photo of this site is "Hakaniemi in Helsinki".

References

Internet search engines Dark web Tor onion services {{Internet-stub