I was browsing Twitter yesterday, following some people I met at the Aaron Swartz memorial hackathon over the weekend when I came across this tweet:

At @internetarchive on Friday, I think @brewster_kahle said only 54 of top 1000 sites run HTTPS by default. Can anybody verify that stat?

— Parker Higgins (@xor) November 11, 2013

Nobody seemed to be able to verify that number, so I fired out Geany and wrote some python to attempt at a verification myself.

I downloaded the Alexa top 1,000,000 .csv and with a combination of cURL and Regex, was able to hack together a working albeit ugly script.

To my surprise, the number I came up with was even lower than the estimate. When the script finally stopped running (it took about 2 hours to cover 1000 urls) the result was that only 44 of the top 1000 sites that I tested redirected http requests to their domain to https. You can view a table with the specifics here.

To be fair, this script only tested the initial landing page. Many of the sites tested will switch to https once the user starts doing something that involves user input, or dealing with data that may be considered sensitive.

Still, the SSL turnout is less than stellar. Let’s hope for an increase to the 0.44 percent figure soon.