First search engine for black markets launched

Sorry, they don't sell kaiju parts.

It's no Google, Yahoo or Bing, but this site could carve its place in search engine history as the first online marketplace of its kind for illegal products and services.

Meet "Grams," which was launched April 15 as a "darknet market search engine" that promises to sort items for relevance, price and newest items.

"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," the administrator of the still-in-beta site, known only as "gramsadmin," said on Reddit.

Gramsadmin said the search engine allows users to change the currency of the prices, and updates bitcoin prices every five minutes.

The engine also allows users to disable markets they do not want to see results for.

A separate article on The Hacker News said Grams presently crawls results from eight black markets, including Agora, BlackBank, C9, Evolution, Mr. Nice Guy, Pandora, The Pirate Market, and SilkRoad2.

"From online conversations, it is estimated that the developer of Grams is trying to contact more underground website owners to offer them indexing their websites on his search engine," it added. — Joel Locsin/TJD, GMA News