The Internet Black Market Just Got Its Own Google

To
find oneself an unmarked automatic weapon required either knowing
exact addresses on the deep web or
a prominent California Democrat. One of those options recently
got a lot harder (sorry,
Leland Yee) but the other may be on the verge of getting
easier. For black market goods most people turn to hard-to-access
places on the Internet, which haven’t been conducive to browsing.
Last week, an anonymous individual launched a search engine called
Grams that caters to all kinds of 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, he spent two weeks building Grams, which looks a lot like
Google, primary color scheme and “feeling lucky” button included.
He built it to function like Google, too. Gramsadmin has
discussed his project on Reddit:

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.

Although it’s only a beta version and only accessible through
the Tor Browser, which facilitates anonymous Internet activity at a
tedious pace, Grams has an average time of one second for a
search to load, which is “super fast, especially for Tor,”
Vice‘s Meghan Neal
reports.

Also, Grams currently only 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.