Black markets are very difficult to access and besides there is that issue of reliability of trust which is even more of an issue in black markets. These black markets are becoming a little less black and more accessible due to the ‘Grams’, a Google-styled search engine for dark web.
Grams is only available through ‘Tor’, the anonymizing browser, due to the nature of its service. It can be accessed on Tor at http://grams7enufi7jmdl.onion and is in beta at the moment. Not only does it look and feel like Google but it will also have many features similar to Google.
“I am working on the algorithm so it is a lot like Google’s it will have a scoring system based how long the listing has been up, how many transactions, how many good reviews. That way you will see the best listing first,” Grams’ creator whose anonymous name is‘Gramsadmin’ wrote on Reddit. He also wrote, “I am going to add a filter market this week so a use can search only the markets they have accounts for.” He declined to provide his real identify.
It is making the painstaking work trivial by already serving up results from eight black markets which are: Agora, BlackBank, C9, Evolution, Mr. Nice Guy, Pandora, The Pirate Market, and SilkRoad2. Although, a very niche idea but the market for such a search engine was always there.
“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?’” Grams’ creator told WIRED in a chat session. “I wanted to make it easy for people to find things they wanted on the darknet and figure out who was a trustworthy vendor.”
‘Gramsadmin’ is working on a scoring system as well as a add system similar to Google AdSense as he revealed in several posts.
“I am working on the algorithm so it is a lot like Google’s it will have a scoring system based how long the listing has been up, how many transactions, how many good reviews. That way you will see the best listing first.”
“Within the next two weeks Grams will have a system similar to Google AdWords where vendors can buy keywords and their listings will go to the top of the search results when those keywords are searched for.”
“They will be bordered with an advertisement disclaimer so users know those are paid results.”
However, scaling up the service will not be easy as he has to hire many other programmers in-order to implement a good enough system which can be difficult as he told WIRED.
“I would love to hire programmers, but it is very hard to hire a good programmer you can trust and still remain anonymous.”
