Onion Search Engine compared with Torch and Haystak| Onion-Suchmaschine | Torch | Haystak |
|---|
| Access route: The site is reached at an ordinary https address, onionsearchengine.com, and it catalogs .onion hidden services of the Tor network. | Access route: Torch runs as an onion service, so it can be opened only through Tor Browser. Its onion address has changed several times and phishing clones are common. | Access route: Haystak is reachable through Tor. The engine does not publish its onion address in the reference consulted. |
| Indexing and coverage: A proprietary crawler catalogs forums, marketplaces and directories, and visitors can submit their own onion sites. The index is described as not very complete. | Indexing and coverage: Torch crawls from seed lists and links on pages already indexed, so it covers publicly linked services well and private ones poorly. Its billion-page claim is described as unverified. | Indexing and coverage: Haystak claims more than 1.5 billion pages across hundreds of thousands of onion sites. These figures are self-reported and unverified. |
| Logging and privacy: The operator states a strict no-log policy: no IP addresses, search queries or session timestamps are collected. | Logging and privacy: Torch reportedly keeps no query logs and runs no analytics. This protects against Torch itself, not against clones, compromised endpoints or browser fingerprinting. | |
| Interface and features: The interface is minimalist, in the style of early web search engines, and a map view is available at the top right of the page. | Interface and features: Results come as keyword matches with short snippets. Torch applies no moderation, verifies nothing it lists and does not flag services that are offline. | Interface and features: The free tier offers keyword search with capped results and shows ads. Premium, billed in Bitcoin, adds cached copies of dead onion sites, regular expression search, keyword email alerts and historical snapshots with API access. |
| Operating status: Torch has operated since roughly the early 2010s and was still running in 2026. | Operating status: Haystak was described as operating in September 2026, with no outages or changes reported. |
