What is Open Index?

Introduction

Open Index is a search engine for the dark web, connecting users to what they are looking for whilst preserving their right to anonymity and privacy. Unlike traditional search engines, Open Index only indexes pages on the dark web and does not index anything on the clear web. The goal of Open Index is to be your one-stop place to search the dark web; the one dark web search engine to rule them all.

How It Works

For any search engine to work, it must create and maintain an index of pages. Open Index employs numerous, robust implementations of search engine index storage system to both store a very large volume of pages and data and maintain and update it. We are constantly scanning the dark web and adding new pages to our index to ensure we always have the most up-to-date and effective search index to work with.

Search engines must employ complex algorithms to be effective and useful, these algorithms must be efficient in order to quickly sort through a large volume of data and pick out what is best for users. Most dark web search engines have very simplistic algorithms that work based on text-analysis alone, this leads to a lot of inaccurate and spammy search results. Open Index uses algorithms that factor in a large amount of information about pages, including keyword relevance and backlinks much like traditional search engines (Google, Bing, etc.). Due to factoring in backlinks, it makes it very difficult for a large volume of spam pages to be shown to users, Open Index takes additional steps in detecting and removing these pages from its index. Backlink ranking actively prevents spam, prioritizes important content and makes it very difficult for an individual to gain the system to force their site to be indexed above others.

Here is an incomplete list of the main things we look for when ranking a page:

• Keyword relevance
• Domain authority
• Direct backlinks

Search Performance & Safety

The search algorithm Open Index uses is the best on the dark web, it is able to accurately match a user to what they are looking for and provide overall better quality search results. When a user is not able to find what they are looking for, it is usually because we don't have a page indexed relating to that or a page does not exist that matches all of the keywords the user entered, not because the search algorithm has failed. Due to this, we are always expanding our index to ensure the entirety of the accessible dark web is indexed by us.

Open Index disagrees with censorship entirely, we do not perform any kind of censorship (including censorship of sites we don't like, news we don't like, etc.) because we do not believe it is our place to do so. With that being said, we still have a moral responsibility to prevent certain content from being indexed and served to users. Removing child abuse material is not 'censorship', it is preventing the reach that websites dedicated to child abuse have over the dark web. When we analyze a page on the dark web, we employ effective algorithms that will detect this content and remove it from our index. These detection algorithms have been tested and have a 99+% success rate while yielding a very low amount of false positives. No detection algorithm is perfect and we always strive to do our best at preventing this content from being shown to users.