WHO IS USING TOR?
Tor has been endorsed by the EFF, The Guardian, Forbes, and Gizmodo, and Null Byte frequently encourages it for browsing or hosting. The misconception that Tor is only used by criminals is completely false. So who are these two million users accessing the Tor network every day? According to Tor:
Normal people. The two most common reasons regular people use Tor is to circumvent censorship and broad mass surveillance. World news, culture, health issues, religions, and other types of information can be locked behind a national firewall that Tor can break through. Also, internet service providers (ISPs) sell our browsing records to marketers or anyone willing to pay for it, and Tor can help prevent that.
Journalists and their audience. "Tor is part of SecureDrop, an open-source whistleblower submission system that media organizations can use to securely accept documents from and communicate with anonymous sources. Many reputable news organizations use SecureDrop."
Law enforcement officers. Tor allows law officers to engage in online "undercover" operations to catch drug dealers, hackers, and criminals. It also makes it possible to accept tips more anonymously about criminal actions.
Activists and whistleblowers. "Human rights activists use Tor to anonymously report abuses from danger zones. Internationally, labor rights workers use Tor and other forms of online and offline anonymity to organize workers in accordance with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Even though they are within the law, it does not mean they are safe. Tor provides the ability to avoid persecution while still raising a voice."
Tor Network Search Engines (6)
There are many search engines that allow users to search for content in the Tor network. Much like Google, these search engines index other .onion websites and add them to a private database.
Candle: A minimalist .onion service search engine without support for parentheses, Boolean operators, or quotes; You just use words and that's it.
Grams: Searches markets only for labor, digital, and physical items you can purchase with Bitcoin and other currencies.
Haystack: Searches .onion services and claims to have 1.5 billion pages indexed in its database from 260,000 websites (which includes .onion websites that no longer exist).
Not Evil: Search engine with an index of over 32 million .onion links.
Torch: Search engine with 450,000 indexed .onion services.
Tor Onionland: Search engine with over 57,000 .onion websites discovered and nearly 5 million indexed pages.