There are even plans for advertising a la Google adwords, according to the developer of Grams, who has been posting announcements about his progress on Reddit.
Listings for guns uncovered by the Grams search engine.Listings for guns uncovered by the Grams search engine.
"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," he wrote in one of his posts.
"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," he wrote in another post. "They will be bordered with an advertisem*nt disclaimer so users know those are paid results."
One more advantage that Grams provides? It helps users locate sites that have gone down -- due to a DDoS attack or other event -- and relaunched under new URLs.
Gramsadmin says he coded the engine on his own, working 14-hour days for the last two weeks, and would love help, though he suspects this will be difficult.
"I have many ideas and features I am trying to implement," he told WIRED. "I would love to hire programmers, but it is very hard to hire a good programmer you can trust and still remain anonymous."
Among the features to be added are profile pages for vendors, to include contact info for the vendor in case a market goes down, and customer reviews of the vendors across multiple markets where they peddle their wares.
"I don't have the capabilities yet to spider all of the darknet, so for now [I'm] working on making an automated site submitter for people to submit their sites and get listed in our search engine," he said. "I will also be making it easier for advertisers to buy ads through an automated system."
The dark web community has been so appreciative of his project, they have already sent out their version of a welcome wagon.
"Grams did get hit by a DDoS attack after the launch of the beta version," he said. "It took us down for a few hours. [But] every major darknet site gets DDoS'd though so I took it as a 'Welcome to the neighborhood' message."
Homepage image: Lisa Roe/Flickr
