It would be great if Kagi could provide a .onion link to access it reliable and private over the tor network. I can't use it over the Tor network because the exit node is blocked (403 Forbidden) which is unfortunate because i don't want my isp/government know which pages i access.
Also some people in authoritarian countries have to use the Tor network to access free information. As DDG also provides an onion link i guess it should be possible for you to do too?
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Provide .onion link for Tor users
Vlad added the Under Review tag .
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But wouldn't that require you to log in while connected to Tor, which is a major de-anonymisation risk?
Vlad The DDG onion address is https://duckduckgogg42xjoc72x3sjasowoarfbgcmvfimaftt6twagswzczad.onion you can open it with a Browser supporting Tor, for example the Tor Browser https://www.torproject.org/download/
There are ways to automatically redirect a user accessing the page (kagi.com) with the Tor browser to the .onion address with a tag on the page. https://tor.stackexchange.com/questions/15421/redirect-to-onion-if-site-was-accessed-from-tor
Besides the benefits i already listed these are additional benefits users get by accessing a .onion service instead of the clearnet address when browsing over Tor:
Using onion services mitigates attacks that can be executed by possibly-malicious “Tor Exit Nodes” — which, though rare, are not nonexistent — and also the fact that you are using a “.onion” address demands that the person is using a TorBrowser, thereby are also mitigating:
- national web blocks
- TLS-man-in-the-middle
- SNI filters
- DNS censorship and tracking (both upon the client side, and that potentially impacting exit nodes)
- a lot of fundamental cookie-tracking and digital-fingerprinting issues
- …and a bunch of other risks to which non-Tor-browsers are prone
Here you can find documentation on how to make a webservice available over Tor, looks pretty simple for normal infrastructure at least:
https://community.torproject.org/onion-services/setup/
KagiForMe It is def not perfect to login to services while using Tor from a anonymity perspective and should be avoided if you are not trusting the service you login to to reveal your identity to law enforcement for example, but this should be clear to Tor users if they try to be as private as possible.
I still think there are many benefits of using kagi over Tor as you can use kagi fully anonymous (private email + private payment and extra subscription for Tor only use for example) and have other Tor benefits of for example your government not seeing you accessing free information (if you life in China for example), or no risk of evil DNS, and better overall privacy when browsing through many webpages
- Edited
Vlad They seem to be pretty low key about their onion service. When searching "ddg tor" on ddg you see it as a search answer. They also redirect to the .onion service from their domain at https://ddg.gg/?q=!ddt
Also found additional docs on the automatic redirect from clearnet page to onion page when using the Tor browser, it's called "Onion-Location": https://community.torproject.org/onion-services/advanced/onion-location/
Vlad
TOR TL;DR:
When the user wants to visit a website, they dont connect automatically to the website, but they encrypt and nest their data three times. Now the request is send over three different "nodes" run by volunteers through the network. Every time a node is passed, they decrypt one layer and forward it to the next node. Only the last node knows, where to send the data (and if using https not even the content). To the website, it is the last node who requests the data, not you with your personal IP.
[The onion thing comes from the layered encryption, like an onion.]
I think (but am no expert here, so please correct me!) that a so called onion service is not on the clear web. They have a different adress scheme (asdf.onion) and work this way:
When the third server in the chain sees, that it is an onion link, they don't connect to a normal website, but they route the data through the volunteer run servers to the website, which is itself "hosted ont he network"(?).
With that being said, I don't think hosting an onion service is that difficult after all. (There should be lots of documentation, and I don't think it's that hard.
The main benefit of an onion service is, that the entire traffic is hidden in the Tor network, not just "your side".(again ?)
Vlad I don't see a critical reason to be low key about providing a service also on Tor. Maybe they don't see it as necessary to make a big announcement as Tor users are mostly tech affine persons and providing an onion service is essentially just a different domain for another network but not a huge thing to announce. Also other popular services like facebook, reddit and X (twitter) also provide onion links.
You can see how to make a service available on Tor (host an onion service) in these guides:
https://riseup.net/ca/security/network-security/tor/onionservices-best-practices
https://community.torproject.org/onion-services/setup/
https://tor.stackexchange.com/questions/15421/redirect-to-onion-if-site-was-accessed-from-tor
4 months later
@Vlad after using Kagi for around 6 months now the missing of this feature still impacts me. I try to use the Tor Browser as much as possible to archive good privacy when browsing, unfortunately i can't use Kagi as most of the time i get a 403 response. This is really annoying and it would be great to be able to use Tor either directly with a onion link or at least make it possible to use the normal clearnet Kagi without getting a 403 
11 days later
Vlad
There is a tool to create a onion mirror of a clearnet site https://tpo.pages.torproject.net/onion-services/onionspray/. It works as a reverse proxy to your site and is used among others by the BBC, The Intercept and Brave.
The main issue is that you block most of the Tor exits with a HTTP error 403
Error: Forbidden If this is easier to fix please do it. That would make an onion service less needed.
Your client does not have permission to get URL / from this server.
8 days later
Hi, if it is not possible to fix Google's load balancer blocking Tor/VPNs, I would really like to see an onion domain for Kagi.
While I have used Tor for privacy/anonymity in the past, I am continuing to use it to contribute to the network - in simple terms, the more people use Tor for their day-to-day browsing, the safer any given user is.
I would have suggested the Enterprise Onion Toolkit, of which the aforementioned Onionspray seems to be a modern fork.
Vlad it is not clear how would an onion address solve it, if the resources are still hosted on GCP?
I'm not very familiar with GCP's services, but ideally if you run Onionspray next to your other services hosted on GCP, it would see you requesting the kagi.com domain rather than the Tor exit, so it wouldn't block the request.
a month later
25 days later
I'm not sure if this fits your needs, but there is also an excellent article on how to set up a Tor service using alt-svc by Jonah Aragon (https://www.jonaharagon.com/posts/securing-services-with-tor-and-alt-svc/).
21 days later
For me its really a show stopper now, can't really use Kagi in tor browser as most exit relays are blocked and other search engines like DDG work fine. Please consider users of Tor, would especially make sense for Kagi as the user has to sign up. So Tor would provide some privacy here.