Cliqz Search as an Onion Service

Over the last years, we at Cliqz have been building our own search index. In contrast to many other “alternative” search engines we don’t use anybody else’s search results. We built everything from scratch with privacy by design not only at the front-end (e.g. not collecting IPs) but even in the way we handle data and how we improve search itself.

This allows us to be very flexible on how to use and apply our search. We’re great fans of the Tor Project that offers a private, anonymous and secure way to access the Internet with their browser and decentralized network. And we want to make the search experience better for Tor network users. As a first step, we’re super proud to release our beta search as a Tor onion service.

Try it at search4tor7txuze.onion on Tor Browser.

Cliqz Search is built on our fast search index, respects your privacy and of course comes without captchas. We believe that in combination with onion services, it’s not only the fastest way to search over Tor, but also one of the safest ways to search online, given the security of onion services.

There are a few websites that already have an onion presence. To make their discovery easy while using our search over onion, known onion addresses will appear as search result for a site – we believe this is unique (and yes, we’re proud of it).

The following animation shows how Cliqz Search as an onion service works:

Our search and onion service are both still in beta, so they’re not supposed to work perfectly yet. You’ll probably miss some onion services or results you would expect. Search results are also not yet optimized for all countries. You can currently choose between Germany, France and USA. Cliqz Search works best with JavaScript enabled. While functional, with JavaScript disabled, the experience may be degraded.

We will work hard to improve this over the next months and years. We want to build this out to a search that works extremely well in and with Tor.

You can help us with your feedback: Bad results? Let us know! We miss an onion service? Let us know! Service is down? Let us know! Give it a try and let us know what you think.

You can report missing onion services by sending an email to onion@cliqz.com.

In the end, we would like to congratulate and thank Alec Muffett for his projects like Enterprise Onion Toolkit (EOTK) – that we’re using to manage our onion service – as well as Real World Onion Sites to map real world sites and their onion counterparts. We’re also looking forward to contributing to such initiatives in the future.