The first-time approach starting on a search page

Searching for nexus market on a regular engine is a first-time approach that most people actually try. It is a bad one. Here is how to survive it.

The first ten results and what they actually were

I typed the phrase in with no quotation marks, no site restriction, and no strong opinions. The first two results were sites that looked like directories but were also, quite obviously, selling something. Two were forum posts that were older than I could tell from the snippet. One was a news piece with the phrase in a headline. The rest were pages I could not identify without opening them, which I did not want to do first thing on a first-time approach.

That is normal. A market name is a busy phrase. On a first-time approach, expect the first page of results to be a shopping district, not a library.

What I actually clicked

I opened the news piece and read the paragraph that mentioned nexus market. It did not include an address. That was good. A news article that treats a market carefully will not shout an address on its front page. From there I looked for a link to a reference or a directory, and I picked the one that read most like a reference and least like a sales page.

A reference-style page will usually list a small number of addresses at the top, without emphasis, and will not promise anything about them. A sales page will lead with a big call to action and a claim of being the official something. On a first-time approach, the reference-style page is the one to read.

Where the address came from in the end

This site is a reference-style page. The three nexus market addresses are at the top of this article, in the addresses block. I chose one, copied it, and moved to Tor Browser.

The search page had not been the source of the address. The search page had been the way I found a site that had the address. That is the first-time distinction that saves the most trouble.

Opening Tor Browser after a normal search

The switch from a normal search page to Tor Browser is the moment the first-time approach starts feeling real. The regular browser stays open in another window, doing whatever it was doing. Tor Browser opens fresh, without history, and I paste the address into its bar.

The two browsers do not know about each other. The regular browser did not carry a session over. That is the whole point of using Tor Browser for this.

What loaded, and what I did about it

The nexus market front page loaded. It was slower than the news article had been. The layout was recognisable: a captcha, a login box below it, and small type at the bottom explaining what the site was. I read the small type. Small type on a market front page is often the most honest text on the page.

I did not sign up. I did not click through the captcha. The first-time approach ends the moment you have seen the front page and know what you are looking at.

The one habit worth borrowing from this approach

The habit is: never take the first address the search page hands you. Even if it turns out to be right, the discipline of finding an independent reference is worth the fifteen seconds it takes. A first-time approach that skips this step becomes a first-time approach that ends up somewhere else and does not know it.

The second habit, smaller: close the search tab after you have the address. If it stays open in the background, you will drift back to it while waiting for Tor Browser to load, and that is how a first-time approach loses its shape.

What this article is not. This is not a rating of any search engine, and not a claim that any of the three addresses is up right now.