[tor-talk] Terminology: Deep v Dark Web

[Roger Dingledine]

On Sat, Jan 25, 2014 at 06:44:11PM +1000, Katya Titov wrote:
> So are there any useful stats on the size of the dark web?

Check out http://freehaven.net/anonbib/#oakland2013-trawling
for some statistics about the number of hidden services as of about
a year ago. It's not all that precise (and the fact that they could
collect these stats represents several bugs:
https://blog.torproject.org/blog/hidden-services-need-some-love )
but it's pretty darn clear that it's not "vast reaches of the Internet"
-- more like on the order of 1000 hidden services, many of which aren't
all that popular.

(Not that popularity is a good judge of the value of a hidden service;
see example #1 on https://blog.torproject.org/blog/using-tor-good )

--Roger