[tor-talk] Number of onions online

[grarpamp]

On 8/24/16, Sarah Jamie Lewis <me at sarahjamielewis.com> wrote:
> last year or so[1]. From my latest data I see about ~7000 onions online

About 9500 in the more or less public set. That's probably because
someone dropped a list out there I suspect contained some
of the spying category including some DHT's.

> during any given crawl date

Who's using prepackaged crawler software foss projects
for fetching, indexing, search, etc?
Versus writing all in house but invoking fetching tool itself?

> Overall we scan ~12000 known onion hosts found by crawling both onion
> ~5000 of the onion hosts we have found have never been online or are
> defunct.

After ingesting a few crap lists and a project lifetime of actually
up onions, I don't have a valid context in metric idea of known
minus defunct. Simply seeing an onion name doesn't earn "known"
here. Trolling through 100k+ for the up's does.

> for onion-dependent software like Ricochet which may not be online

Yes published transiently up services are hard to confirm.

> [1] https://mascherari.press/onionscan-report-june-2016/

I don't think anyone's ever beat my raw collecting.
But this is because they're really good at making awesome
graphical interpretations from their own datasets :)

Lots of research out there...