onionengine .onion search

What you're searching

Onion Engine looks inside the Tor network — the part of the web that ordinary crawlers can't reach. Sites there don't have domain names in the usual sense and aren't linked from the public web, so Google and Bing have nothing to follow and nothing to index. Reaching them takes a crawler that speaks Tor.

That's what sits behind this page: an index built by continuously crawling reachable .onion services and keeping track of which ones are still alive. Addresses change often and services disappear without notice, so a listing is only as good as how recently it was checked.

Dark web or deep web?

The two get used interchangeably, and they aren't the same thing. The deep web is simply everything not indexed by public search engines — your webmail, a bank dashboard, a paywalled archive, an internal wiki. It's most of the web by volume, and there's nothing exotic about it.

The dark web is much smaller and needs specific software to reach. On Tor that means .onion services, which route through the network rather than resolving through DNS, and don't reveal where they're hosted.

What runs there is broader than the reputation suggests: the BBC publishes an onion mirror for readers in countries that block it, newsrooms take documents from sources through SecureDrop, and projects like Debian offer a route that doesn't depend on certificate authorities. Some of it is criminal. Most of it is not particularly interesting, which is the part the coverage tends to leave out.

Opening what you find

A .onion address won't load in Chrome, Safari or Firefox. There's no name server to ask where it lives, so a normal browser returns a DNS error — the address isn't blocked, it's invisible from outside the network. You need Tor Browser.

Every result here shows its full address with a copy button, so you can paste it straight into Tor Browser. If you're already browsing over Tor, links open directly and we get out of the way. Our guide on opening .onion links covers the whole process, including how to check an address before you trust it — phishing copies of well-known services are common, and a single changed character points somewhere else entirely.

How this compares to other Tor search tools

Several search tools cover the Tor network, and they differ mostly in how they were built and what they choose to list. Some index aggressively and return a great deal of dead or hostile material; others curate tightly and miss things.

Two things set this one apart. Results carry the full address up front rather than hiding it behind a title, because when you can't simply click through, the address is the thing you actually need. And nothing is proxied — we publish addresses and never fetch, mirror or relay what's on them, so opening one is always your own action in your own browser.

Free to use, and available as an API

Searching is free, with no account and no registration. We don't profile visitors or build a history of what you look for.

The same index is available programmatically for research, monitoring and investigation work — service discovery, address metadata, historical records of when a service was last seen. If you're tracking whether your own domains, brands or credentials are appearing on onion services, that's what the API is for.