Developed during the
2014 Google Summer of Code by Juha Nurmi with support from the
Tor Project, the
open source. Ahmia indexes onion websites on the Tor network. The search engine is open-source: the crawler component is based on
Scrapy, the index component is built with
Elasticsearch, and the website component is developed with
Django. Ahmia has a strict policy of filtering
child sexual abuse material, and since October 2023, Ahmia has expanded its filter to include all sexually related searches, citing widespread distribution and search of child sexual abuse on Tor as the reason. In a study in
Scientific Reports explained the filtering policies for Ahmia and its role in combating the distribution of illicit content on the Tor network. The paper also acknowledged the contributions of the first author, Juha Nurmi, the creator of Ahmia as he expanded filtering policies in November 2023. According to the scientific publication, the decision to broaden content filtering was the result of the research findings, which showed that 11 percent of search sessions sought child sexual abuse material on Tor and that around one-fifth of onion websites hosted such unlawful content. The service partners with
GlobaLeaks's submissions and
Tor2web statistics for hidden service discovery and as of July 2015 has indexed about 5000 sites. Ahmia is also affiliated with
Hermes Center for Transparency and Digital Rights, an organization that promotes transparency and freedom-enabling technologies. In July 2015 the site published a list of hundreds of fraudulent clones of web pages (including such sites as
DuckDuckGo, as well a
dark web page). According to Nurmi, "someone runs a fake site on a similar address to the original one and tries to fool people with that" with the intent of scamming people (e.g. gathering bitcoin money by spoofing bitcoin addresses). == See also ==