Ahmia


Ahmia is a clearnet search engine for Tor's hidden services created by Juha Nurmi. Together with VPN and Tor, this technology is crucial in exploring the dark web, which is reported to be about ten times bigger than normal net content.

Overview

Developed during the 2014 Google Summer of Code with support from the Tor Project, the open source 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 and keeps a blacklist of abusive services.
The service partners with GlobaLeaks'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. 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.