Despite the fact that the hidden Tor service The Hidden Wiki stopped working back in 2007, many people think about it with nostalgia. The site was an anonymous wiki encyclopedia, which was protected from censorship. Let’s remember those wonderful days when any user after registration could edit materials in The Hidden Wiki.
The long-established location hidden Tor-service The Hidden Wiki (http://6sxoyfb3h2nvok2d.onion/) is now gone and now only shows the following message:
There are several location hidden wiki’s. The one knows as The hidden wiki is the one admitted and recommended as a starting point for people who are new to Tor and the only-available-to-Tor-users location hidden services, which possibly explains why this particular hidden wiki is known as The hidden wiki.
Location hidden services are websites and services who are provided using a Tor-server and can only be accessed using a Tor-client. The actual domains for the services are hard to guess (and remember) because the domains are actually hashes of a private key. This provides security since you can be sure that the service you connect to are actually run by the person(s) who have the key for the hash you are visiting. It also makes location hidden services very hard to find by accident.
The hidden wiki was a nice starting point for location hidden services, a “front page” if you will. Now it’s gone. Thus; I feel compelled to provide some other nice starting points for people who are relatively new to Tor and location hidden services.
Nnqtnsoohprzqcke™
Nnqtnsoohprzqcke(tm) is a Tor-land search-engine based on the free DataParkSearch search engine software. It’s a great first step into the world of location hidden Tor-services for two important reasons:
- It looks very much like that well-known non-Tor search-engine.
- It’s fast. Relatively speaking. Tor’s .onion services are slower than normal websites. Searching nnqtnsoohprzqcke is slower than other search-engines for this reason, but the slight deal is limited to the typical “it’s a .onion site”-delay. nnqtnsoohprzqcke itself seems very fast.
Toogle
Toogle is the other good Tor-land search-engine. It’s based on mnogosearch and is a nice startingpoint. It seems to return fewer and less relevant results than Nnqtnsoohprzqcke(tm), but still: It’s relatively fast and it presents a clean search-result page.
Just a few more tips
The above mentioned search-engines should allow you to find most of the interesting non-closed community location hidden services. Here are a few more startingpointers just for fun:
- onionforum – perhaps the most visited/used forum in onionland.
- APE hidden services links – A wikipage with a list of location hidden services, much like the one which was at the front page of The hidden wiki.
This should be enough links to .onion-land to get you started on the anonymous and uncencored Internet.
One last little detail: There are a few location hidden services who may upset some people. 99.9% of them are labelled as such when linked to, the chance of accidentially visiting a site with content that is disturbing to most people is realtively low. But it may happen. You’ve been warned. Now.. welcome to Tor-land and do enjoy all the subversive sites and services out there!