On the surface web, researchers report English is at the top with only 54%. We observed that 86% of onion sites have English as their primary language, with the next two most common being Russian with 2.8% and German with 1.6%. From a language standpoint, onion sites are more homogeneous than the surface web.Uptime even on popular dark web sites is well below the 99.999% “five nines” availability that is expected for reputable companies on the surface web, and onion sites regularly disappear permanently with or without explanation. Scams are prevalent, such as a typosquatting scam that claims to have successfully defrauded users of over 400 popular onion sites, netting thousands of dollars in Bitcoin from victims. These onion sites are disorganized and unreliable.The popular iceberg metaphor that describes the relationship of the surface web and dark web is upside down. Out of about 55,000 onion domains that we found, only around 8,400 onion domains had a live site (15%). Our count of live reachable onion site domains comes to less than 0.005% of the number of surface-web site domains. In reality, the number of onion sites is tiny compared to the size of the surface web.

The collection of onion sites that is sometimes called the dark web is often portrayed as a vast and mysterious part of the internet.

The onion router dark web