So I was searching to see what happened to Dread Pirate Roberts, the creator of underground marketplace Silkroad, and I came across something very strange; onion websites URLs being crawled by Google (see photo below). Does Google actually index onion sites? Under the Silk Road title, it seems it's saying that the content isn't actually hosted inside the Tor network, but then again, doesn't the domain .onion.to imply that it is actually inside Tor nework?
http://onion.to/ is a proxy into Tor hidden services.
This gateway to Tor hidden services provides convenient access to Tor hidden services. It is a pure proxy that forwards requests to the respective hidden service. We do not store any data and are not liable for the content.
As you can see from the domain, it does not end in .onion as the hidden service domain inside the Tor network does. In fact the hidden service domain
foo.onion
is mapped to
foo.onion.to
which can be accessed via normal HTTP without using a Tor client. This provides no anonymity:
Onion.to as a gateway cannot offer any anonymity for the visitor.
Google can access such a proxied hidden service without using a Tor client, too.
Additionally to Lutz Horn.
There is tor2web. wiki.tor2web.org
Tor2web Project Goal is to allow transparent internet exposure of websites running on Tor Hidden Services .
E.g. Yahoo, keep onion sites in cache.
