Its crawlers continuously discover and parse websites, adding thousands of pages each day, with a stated goal of indexing 100 million sites. Pages are organized into a ranked full-text index, enriched with DNS and network information, and returned as search results in milliseconds.

The service emphasizes privacy: searches require no account, are processed in memory, and are discarded rather than logged or stored. cl0q says it does not use search profiles, behavioral ad targeting, or cross-site tracking. Users can refine searches with operators for phrases, domains, titles, URLs, IP addresses, networks, and other criteria, or explore the index by attributes such as country and language.

cl0q is preparing to make its search engine open source. It also offers early access to a crawler-contributor program, allowing participants to run nodes that help expand the shared index.