[tor-talk] Funded search engine for onionspace?

["l.m" <ter.one.leeboi@xxxxxxxx>]

Hi,

Thanks for hosting a Tor2web proxy. I think I'm using the search wrong
though. What exactly is it supposed to do? If I type in duckduckgo I
don't find a useable link to the hidden service. If I type in the
onion for duckduckgo I don't get any indication that the link is,
well, duckduckgo. To be fair a similar problem occurs with a regular
google query. On the other hand, with google itself, I can type
duckduckgo in combination with onion.cab and get a link. I'm sure I'm
using this wrong. When someone says to me, I have a search engine for
onion space, I think of typing in duckduckgo and getting results as:

- detect use of Tor and provide a link to the .onion topmost, or
redirect to the .onion if using .onion.city
- provide onion.city proxy links for everyone else that make it clear
it's the site queried
- provide alternatives to onion.city, such as the mirrors tor2web.org,
tor2web.fi, tor2web.blutmagie.de, onion.cab 

The last one seems especially important because, as was recently made
clear, an attack on an individual proxy can render it useless for
tor2web traffic. I've also read recently about how trivial it is to
get a list of google queries that correspond with client requests.
This makes me worry that a custom google query would also put this
data in the clear. Is this a custom google running in it's own rack
indexing sites? Clearnet search engines cannot access an onion so
wouldn't that make it hard for googlebot to crawl the site,
automatically, for sitemap or robots.txt? You would have to submit the
sitemap to google, and use a tor2web mirror in the address? Wouldn't
this create fragmentation in search results that only list tor2web
mirrors the crawler is aware of?

There should be more collaboration in these emerging search engines
otherwise you'll be outpaced by darpa. Note that darpa won't be
opposed to using questionable tactics in obtaining hidden service
data.

--leeroy

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