Our general recommendation hasn't changed: anyone interested in getting into the Deep Web will have a more complete and safer experience by downloading a copy of Tor Browser and adjusting a few browsing habits. Still, the urge to “take a look” is always there, and for those cases there's the Onion Search Engine, which serves up multiple results from .onion portals, reachable through its own Tor2Web service.
A little over a year ago we shared an article dedicated to the best Deep Web search engines, and along the way we discovered the natural difficulties of getting reliable results. In other words, the Deep Web is packed with digital junk, full of abandoned portals, error messages and broken links that you have to fight through. But before that, some people just want to explore and get to “a demo”, so to speak.
That's where Tor2Web steps in, a project that lets users visit Onion services without the Tor Browser. Tor veterans have repeated to exhaustion that nobody should use it for security reasons, but it all depends on how good the implementation is. Onion Search Engine offers its own Tor2Web access, so all .onion portals are one click away... in theory.
Onion Search Engine: Explore the Deep Web without Tor
Why do I say “in theory”? Because the search engine itself doesn't fail, but loading the sites is a different story. The descriptions of the services are limited, and errors are the order of the day. Onion Search Engine does its best to determine whether a service is online or not (with small green and red indicators, along with the last update date), but we can't trust it too much. Onion Search Engine also offers an extension to integrate its functions into Google Chrome, and an Android-compatible app, which Edgardo mentioned in July last year.
In short, Onion Search Engine delivers on its promise: it presents a set of results based on .onion services and enables you to explore them without using the Tor Browser. The problem is that when it comes to loading those services, all we can say is “good luck”, because most of them seem broken and down. Of course, don't let my poor personal experience stop you. Give it a try on your end and share how it went.
Official site: Click here
