[tor-talk] Funded search engine for onionspace?

[George Kadianakis]

Virgil Griffith <i at virgil.gr> writes:

> I present:
>
> http://onion.city
>
> currently searching ~348,000 pages according to site:onion.city on GOOG.
>
> -V

Ah, exciting!

The use of a custom google search is an interesting idea. I also like
the motto and the logo! (although search engine logos are supposed to
be colorful right?)

Some comments:

- How does the custom google search thing works? Where does it get its
  index? You expose all the tor2web onions on your sitemap, so google
  crawls them and generates an index?

  I'm a bit concerned that clients connect directly to Google. Can
  this be avoided and still keep the custom google search functionality?

- I don't like that the default link is through onion.city. This means
  that onion.city watches *both* the search query *and* the content of
  the communication. That's crazy.

  It's especially crazy if you allow your clients to submit HTTP forms
  over onion.city, since it basically means that onion.city gets to
  see *all* the usernames and passwords. I bet there are many people
  out there who don't really get the tor2web threat model, and it's
  nasty to read their passwords.

  There are various ways to solve or semi-solve this problem. My
  preference is to *always* default to the onion link (and maybe also
  have an option for a tor2web alternative). Combined with a nice
  guide on how to download Tor, this might help user education and IMO
  it's the responsible thing to do.

- How do you crawl for more onions?

- It really needs HTTPS!

- Are you planning to also index non-HTTP services?

- Serving onion.city as a hidden service would be nice.

- Curious on the funding model here. Will there be ads?

Thanks and best of luck with your project!