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Economics

Google Dark

In April an anonymous individual launched a search engine called Grams that caters to contraband needs.

Zenon Evans | From the August/September 2014 issue

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For black market goods, many people turn to hard-to-access corners of the Internet, which generally haven't been conducive to browsing. In April, however, an anonymous individual launched a search engine called Grams that caters to contraband needs.

Known only as "Gramsadmin," the engine's creator explained to Wired, "I noticed on the forums and Reddit people were constantly asking 'where to get product X?' and 'which market had product X?' or 'who had the best product X and was reliable and not a scam?' I wanted to make it easy for people to find things they wanted on the darknet and figure out who was a trustworthy vendor."

So Grams spent two weeks building Grams, which looks a lot like Google, down to the primary color scheme and "feeling lucky" button.

In the beta version, Grams has an average time of one second for a search to load, which is generally considered fast for the web's back alleys. Grams shows results from eight different marketplaces, such as SilkRoad2, Agora, and BlackBank. For those who want to give it a whirl, "grams7enufi7jmdl.onion" is the address.

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Zenon Evans is a former Reason staff writer and editor.

EconomicsScience & TechnologyBlack MarketsInternet
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