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Underground Search Engine "Dark Internet"

Governments are forcing search engines to show wrong results. It's time for search engines to go rogue so they can be right.

In the 1990s and 2000s, the limitation was technical. The so-called "deep web" and "dark Internet/Dark Web" -- which sound shady and mysterious, but simply refer to web sites inaccessible by conventional means -- have always existed.

Many parts of the Internet are hard to index, or are blocked from being indexed by their owners.
Companies like Google have worked hard to surface and bring light to the "deep, dark web" recesses of the global web on a technical level.

But in the past few years, a disturbing trend has emerged where governments -- either through law or technical means or by the control of the companies that provide access -- have forced inaccuracy, omissions and misleading results on the world's major search engines.



The reasons for these requests vary, and often sound reasonable -- national security, law and order, national pride, religious sensitivity, social order, suppression of hate speech, privacy, protection of children -- you name it. But when you add them up and allow them to grow in number over time, the cumulative effect is that increasingly, search results don't reflect the real Internet. 

Until recently, search engine censorship was not on the list of first-world problems. But in the last few years, governments in the United States, Europe and elsewhere in the industrialized world have discovered that, although they're prevented by free-speech laws from actually blocking or banning content where it lives, censoring search engine results is a kind of "loophole" they can get away with. In an increasingly digitized, search-engine discoverable world of content, censoring search results is a way to censor without technically violating free speech protections.

Starting in 2011, companies like Google started reporting a disturbing rise in government requests for search engine results to lie -- to essentially tell users that existing pages and content on the Internet do not exist when in fact they do. Requests for such removals by the U.S. government, for example, rose 718% from the first half of 2011 to the last half. And they've continued to rise since.

And such requests weren't just coming from the U.S., but from "Western democracies not typically associated with censorship," according to the Google policy analyst who reported the trend on behalf of the company and talked about Google's Transparency Report.

Worse, the ruling required search engines to offer a process by which any European could request similar treatment, and ordered Google, Microsoft and other search engine companies to judge whether those requests were valid and to take action on the valid ones.
At last count, Google had received some 70,000 requests for changes to search results under the ruling in the past month. Microsoft only this week launched its process for censoring results.

Useful Underground Web Search Engines


Most Internet users are so familiar with the major search engines that they don't realize there are other options out there. While it might sound silly to say, there are plenty of underground web search engines for you to choose from if the larger ones aren't cutting it for you. Some only deal with a single subject, and others offer more detailed options, but either way they will help you find what you are looking for.

Duck Duck Go

On the surface, Duck Duck Go doesn't seem like an underground web search engine. When you actually use it, you'll notice your search results look different. This is because Duck Duck Go augments its searches with information from crowd sourced websites, such as Wikipedia, and does this without collecting private information.

Duck Duck Go

Deep Dyve

While the deep web is often a concept applied to bogus conspiracy theories and science fiction fantasies, it is an actual thing. The deep web is made up of sites and pages that otherwise are unreachable by traditional search engines. Deep Dyve is an underground web search engine that finds information from hundreds of thousands of scholarly and research articles.

Deep Dyve


Prospector

Prospector is an underground web search engine that focuses on finding you free things. It aggregates information from across the Internet about freeware programs, free samples and free offers from businesses in almost every category. While it isn't a place to go for general information, it is a place to go if you need free alternatives to Microsoft Office, or shampoo samples.

Prospector

Torrent Finder

While other sites act as torrent aggregation and search engines, Torrent Finder is considered to be the king of them all. It allows you to search almost every one of the largest torrent sites on the Internet using one search term, and even allows you to pick and choose which sites you want to download from.

Torrent Finder

UFO Seek

If you are looking for underground search engines, it doesn't get much more underground than UFO Seek. This search engine is dedicated entirely to finding information about the paranormal. UFOs, ghosts and bigfoot. As usual, take anything you find with a large grain of salt.

UFO Seek

Grams



 

While the underground web may not be as titillating as many people wish it to be, using search engines that scrape below the surface help you find the information you need for almost any subject.


Dark Web
The “dark web” is a part of the world wide web that requires special software to access. One these, the most popular is Tor (originally called The Onion Router), partly because it is one of the easiest software packages to use. Tor downloads as a bundle of software that includes a version of Firefox configured specifically to use Tor.

Once inside, web sites and other services can be accessed through a browser in much the same way as the normal web.

However, some sites are effectively “hidden”, in that they have not been indexed by a search engine and can only be accessed if you know the address of the site. Special markets also operate within the dark web called, “darknet markets”, which mainly sell illegal products like drugs and firearms, paid for in the cryptocurrency Bitcoin.

Now Dark Web is not Dark anymore because of FBI and NSA


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