DarkSearch, one of the largest search engines on the dark web, announces closure of public access

DarkSearch is a relatively new entrant in the dark web search engine space, once open to both dark web and bright web dual access, calling itself "The 1st real Dark Web search engine". But the popular search engine has now announced that it is shutting down access for regular users and appears to be going commercial.

DarkSearch's creators have a background in cybersecurity and are committed to helping businesses and individuals better address today's cyber threats. The platform was created to demystify the dark web and provide businesses with an opportunity to research and access onion services directly.

The search engine is also designed to simplify the technical hurdles encountered by inexperienced dark web users and to help businesses optimize their dark web monitoring activities.

DarkSearch had indexed all freely accessible Onion platforms, and the search engine's creators promise to advance the search engine's content, including access to restricted dark web forums. Its crawler engine can do 7×24 real-time crawling of the dark web.

DarkSearch operator Jocelin had published an article introducing DarkSearch in medium on May 10, 2019 (https://medium.com/@darksearch/darksearch-the-1st-real-search-engine-dark-web-darksearch-vs-ahmia-84852fd4c51b).

Why develop a search engine on the Dark Web ?

I’m very close to cybersecurity, and I realized that the darkweb is still quite mystical among customers and CISOs. I developed DarkSearch to demystify the Dark Web, and especially allow companies to directly research and directly access sites onion (through Tor2Web) in order to protect their assets.
I wanted to simplify both the “technical barrier” to access the darkweb, but also simplify monitoring activities on this network.
DarkSearch is both a tool to facilitate the work of cybersecurity cabinets but also a tool that addresses directly to their customers (companies).
Currently DarkSearch indexes all .onion sites in free access, but our goal is also to give you access to the content of all blackmarkets and restricted forums! Which is quite exclusive as functionality.

Why is DarkSearch different from Ahmia?

There are some other engines such as Ahmia.fi, here are some characteristics that differentiate us:
Like Ahmia, DarkSearch is free;
Unlike Ahmia we provide a free API to automate searches (with some limitations to avoid the DDOS);
According to Ahmia, their search engine indexes just under 3,000 sites .onion, DarkSearch has almost 20,000;
We integrate recurrent crawling (weekly, like Shodan at the time);
The Darksearch results are directly accessible on the ClearWeb thanks to Tor2Web;
Finally, like Ahmia we do not keep logs of searches done;

The darknet onion address of this search engine is currently inaccessible and torwhois shows that the darknet site was last online on December 7, 2021. And a visit to its explicit address reveals that the site announced on January 3, 2022: "Public access to DarkSearch is now ended, apologies for the inconvenience.If you are an organisation and wish to request private access, contact us at bonjour[@]owlint.fr."

We will continue to follow the subsequent development of DarkSearch, and here we share with you some official links to DarkSearch.

DarkSearch's dark web v3 address is:
http://darkschn4iw2hxvpv2vy2uoxwkvs2padb56t3h4wqztre6upoc5qwgid.onion

DarkSearch's clearnet URL is:
https://darksearch.io

DarkSearch's Twitter is:
https://twitter.com/DarkSearchApp

DarkSearch's Linkedin is:
https://www.linkedin.com/company/darksearch