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takyon [soylentnews.org] writes:

Dark web sites don't link to each other very often [sciencemag.org]:

Researchers have just conducted a comprehensive mapping of the dark web and found that it's not much of a web at all. They started with a few central hubs in the ".onion" domain (sort of like .com on the surface web) and used an algorithm to crawl along links from site to site, finding only 7178 sites, connected to each other through 25,104 links. (Sites with no inbound links couldn't be counted.) Their key finding is that 87% of these dark web sites don't link to any other sites. The dark web is more of a set of "dark silos," [arxiv.org] they write in a preliminary paper posted on arXiv yesterday. Dark websites linked to surface websites and to other dark websites at the same rate, ruling out dark sites' ephemerality as an explanation for their scant interconnections.

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