Tordex Search Glossary: 30 Tor And Darknet Terms

Quick answer: why a glossary?

Onion search borrows vocabulary from networking, information retrieval, and research methods. This glossary explains the terms you will meet while using Tordex and reading its results.

Onion service

A service reachable through Tor using a .onion address rather than a public DNS name.

.onion address

The encoded name of an onion service. Version 3 addresses are derived from a public key.

Version 3 address

The current onion address format, 56 characters before the .onion suffix.

Tor

The anonymity network that carries onion service traffic and other connections.

Circuit

The path through several Tor relays used for a connection.

Relay

A Tor node that forwards traffic. A circuit passes through more than one relay.

Introduction point

A relay used by an onion service to receive connection requests without revealing its location.

Descriptor

Published information that lets clients find and connect to an onion service.

Crawler

A program that discovers and fetches pages automatically so they can be indexed.

Seed

A starting address used by a crawler to begin discovery.

Index

The searchable store of text and metadata that an engine queries.

Snippet

The short extract shown under a search result.

Canonical link

The address a service publishes as its main location, as opposed to a mirror.

Mirror

An alternate address that serves the same or similar content.

Liveness

Whether a service is reachable at a particular time.

Freshness

How recently an index or a cached page was updated.

Staleness

The degree to which an index no longer reflects the live network.

Coverage

The share of a target population that an index contains. It is usually unknown.

Deduplication

Removing duplicate records for the same service, mirror, or address.

Provenance

The record of where a piece of data came from and how it was obtained.

Verification

Independent confirmation that a service or claim is correct at a stated time.

OSINT

Open-source intelligence: collection and analysis of publicly available information.

OpSec

Operational security: practices used to protect identities, data, and systems.

Clearnet

The ordinary internet reached through public DNS, as opposed to onion services.

Deep web

Content not reachable by ordinary crawling, such as pages behind logins.

Dark web

A loose term for content that is not indexed by mainstream search engines and often requires special software.

Directory

A human-curated list of services, usually organised by topic.

Fingerprinting

Identifying a user or service from technical characteristics rather than names.

Bot mitigation

Techniques used by a service to detect and block automated clients.

Rate limiting

Restricting how often a client may make requests, often to reduce load or abuse.

Where to go next

Return to the Tordex overview or read the Tor primer.

Last updated: October 2026. Site map.