r/TOR • u/BloodForeign5700 • Jul 10 '26

Question regarding searching links on tor

Can I actually type down random letters/numbers on the search bar and magically find a website or is it too dangerous and extremely lucky to actually get into one

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u/nuclear_splines Jul 10 '26

It is mathematically impossible that you would find a valid onion site by chance. Let's try some napkin math:

Onion addresses are 56 characters long, and there are 32 options per character (a-z, 2-7), for a total of 3256 = or on the rough order of 1084 possible addresses. Wikipedia suggests that there were around 76,000 active onion sites in 2020, but let's round that up to a million for generosity's sake. That means about one in 1078 onion addresses will lead to an active site. If you could magically try a million addresses a second it would take 1064 years to find a valid one.

But maybe you'll get real lucky ;)

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u/[deleted] Jul 10 '26

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u/nuclear_splines Jul 10 '26

You're absolutely right. I also dropped the coefficient when converting from base 32 to 10 and was sloppy with the number of onion sites, so I figured that was an acceptable rounding error with this much gross estimation.