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.