Not sure if GQ is the correct forum, but this is a simple question with a factual answer.
Once, I stumbled across a perfectly delightful website/search engine that showed how different sites ranked in popularity. For example, to pull some numbers out of my butt, amazon.com was 12, snopes was in the 13,000s, joe schmo’s personal domain was 1,632,916. I cannot find it now!
I seem to remember that the name may have been similiar to a feminine personal name, like Ashley.com or Alora.net. Anyone have any clue?
I believ you’re thinking of www.alexa.com. Their business practices are unethical and have been illegal in the past. I would be suspicious of their data.
Thats it! How disapointing that it’s not on the up and up.
Thank you.
Alexa’s information is based on tracking the sites visited by the people who have downloaded and use the Alexa browser toolbar.
Their toolbar only works on Windows IE platforms and AOL users are not included. So they miss traffic from vast swathes of the Internet browsing population.
So their sample is not necessarily statistically relevent nor corrected to more faithfully reflect the general Internet population.
The two main references in terms of measuring web Traffic are Nielsen//NetRatings and Media Metrix (now Comscore). These services strive to maintain a more statistically relevant sample. But the validity of their methodologies have always been subject to much debate over the years and there is no agreed standard way to accurately measure traffic (read more here).
However these services require you to pay hefty subscriptions to see much of their data unlike Alexa which is free.
However you can freely see some exerpts of their data for the top ranked sites: the Media Metrix Top 50 properties list and the Nielsen//NEtRatings Top 25 properties list.
But if you are looking to see how Joe Jchmo’s personal domain is keeping up with AOL then these sites will not help you. 
By the way, Alexa is owned by Amazon.com. They were investigated by the FTC because their toolbars gathered personal information about users and stored it in their servers. The FTC decided finally not to act even though they thought their privavy policies “likely were deceptive”. Amazon Alexa corrected the offending bits of their technology and settled civil suits out of court for $2M with users who claimed their privacy was violated by Alexa ($40 per person).
My personal take is that Alexa did not intentionally do wrong but their code was sloppy and had been written without fully taking account of the possible privacy violations. Then when people started complaining they handled it badly and it blew up in their faces.
I give them a lot of credit though because they also provide most of the support for the wonderful and vital Internet Archive.
Fergus