Torch Search Glossary: 30 Tor And Darknet Terms

A

Address (onion address): the long, encoded name of an onion service, ending in .onion. Version 3 addresses are 56 characters long. Anonymity: the property that an observer cannot easily link an action to an identity. Tor provides a degree of anonymity, not absolute anonymity.

C

Circuit: the path through several Tor relays used for a connection. Clearnet: the ordinary internet reached through public DNS, as opposed to onion services. Crawler: a program that discovers and fetches pages automatically. Coverage: the share of the target population that an index contains, which is usually unknown and partial.

D

Dark web: a loose term for content that is not indexed by mainstream search engines and often requires special software. Deep web: content not reachable by ordinary crawling, such as pages behind logins. The two terms are often confused. Directory: a human-curated list of services.

F

Freshness: how recently an index was updated. Fingerprinting: identifying a user or service from technical characteristics rather than names.

H

Hidden service: the older name for an onion service. Hit: a single result returned for a query.

I

Index: the searchable store of pages and terms that an engine queries. Indexing: the process of turning fetched pages into that store.

L

Liveness: whether a service is reachable at a given time. A search result does not prove liveness.

M

Mirror: an alternate address serving the same or similar content. Mirrors complicate deduplication.

O

Onion service: a service reachable through Tor using a .onion address. Onion search engine: a search engine that indexes onion services. OSINT: open-source intelligence, the collection and analysis of publicly available information. OpSec: operational security, the practices used to protect identities and data.

R

Relay: a Tor node that forwards traffic. Ranking: the order in which results are shown. Result set: all results returned for a query.

S

Snippet: the short extract shown under a result. Seed: a starting address used by a crawler. Staleness: the degree to which an index no longer reflects the live network.

T

Tor: the anonymity network that carries onion service traffic. Tor Browser: the browser commonly used to access Tor and onion services. Torch: an onion service search engine, not to be confused with Torch Browser.

V

Verification: independent confirmation that a service or claim is correct. Version 3 onion address: the current address format, based on public-key cryptography.

Return to the Torch overview or read the Tor and onion services primer.

Last updated: October 2026. Site map.