# Website popularity ranking **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [December 15, 2003, 11:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/website-popularity-ranking/219217 "2003-12-15T23:47:50Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 10\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![wolf\_meister](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/wolf_meister/32/15202_2.png) [@wolf\_meister](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/wolf_meister)\ **Post date:** [December 15, 2003, 11:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/website-popularity-ranking/219217/1 "2003-12-15T23:47:50Z")
About a month ago, someone on the SDMB told me that [www.alexa.com](http://www.alexa.com) shows the popularity (traffic rating) of just about any site. Since then, I discovered another such website on my own: [www.websearch.com](http://www.websearch.com) Are there any other websites of this type? ---
**Author:** ![Nanoda](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/ce73a5/32.png) [@Nanoda](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Nanoda)\ **Post date:** [December 16, 2003, 3:17am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/website-popularity-ranking/219217/2 "2003-12-16T03:17:06Z")
Sheeyaaaaa… see, the reason they know how popular a given site is, is they’ve loaded spyware on a whole load of ppl’s computers. I don’t suggest anyone frequent either of these two places. ---
**Author:** ![wolf\_meister](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/wolf_meister/32/15202_2.png) [@wolf\_meister](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/wolf_meister)\ **Post date:** [December 16, 2003, 3:26am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/website-popularity-ranking/219217/3 "2003-12-16T03:26:49Z")
Geez, and I visit those 2 sites a lot. (I like to find out that my site ranks 97,375 for the day !!! Ego trip I guess.) Anyway, I suppose it _is_ spyware because you have to download a search toolbar of theirs so that your websurfing is collected for their website popularity statistics. (Actually, I never downloaded these). So, I guess this is just another Internet gimmick ?       :smack: ---
**Author:** ![ftg](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ftg/32/2801_2.png) [@ftg](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ftg)\ **Post date:** [December 16, 2003, 4:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/website-popularity-ranking/219217/4 "2003-12-16T16:12:49Z")
_All_ website popularity data is worthless. In addition to the spyware crap method, there are several self-proclaimed “official” statistics gathering companies. But web sites provide the data voluntarily. So they can just lie and inflate the figures. (About a half year ago there was a site that came out of nowhere to get highly ranked. Guess how that happened.) But many sites just don’t provide that data. So undercounting is rampant. Then there is the fact that there is this whole other Internet out there involving pr0n sites. Very popular, don’t appear at all on most lists. Any numbers collected via or on the Internet are completely bogus. They are not data. They have no meaning. ---
**Author:** ![muttrox](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/a8b319/32.png) [@muttrox](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/muttrox)\ **Post date:** [December 16, 2003, 9:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/website-popularity-ranking/219217/5 "2003-12-16T21:56:45Z")
The fact that many are bogus does not mean all are. The company I work for happens to provide them, and I can tell you they are as accurate as we can make them, and as accurate as an independent auditor can verify. For any site that gets revenue from ads, you need to be able to reliably demonstrate traffic statistics, same as a radio or TV station needs to be able to reliably demonstrate viewership to potential advertisers. ---
**Author:** ![wolf\_meister](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/wolf_meister/32/15202_2.png) [@wolf\_meister](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/wolf_meister)\ **Post date:** [December 16, 2003, 11:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/website-popularity-ranking/219217/6 "2003-12-16T23:23:24Z")
Well in the case of Websearch and Alexa, I rank about 90,000 on one and about 180,000 on the other. Gee, what accurate data - it’s within a factor of two. Heck, I don’t take it too seriously. It’s just fun to see how popular my site is. (sort of) (YMMV - considerably as a matter of fact). ---
**Author:** ![muttrox](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/a8b319/32.png) [@muttrox](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/muttrox)\ **Post date:** [December 16, 2003, 11:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/website-popularity-ranking/219217/7 "2003-12-16T23:30:04Z")
Do they have the same actual numbers for you? Ranking may just mean one is looking at a more comprehensive list, or has less stringent requirements. Do they claim to measuring the exact same thing? (I honestly don’t know) ---
**Author:** ![micco](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/5f8ce5/32.png) [@micco](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/micco)\ **Post date:** [December 17, 2003, 2:09am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/website-popularity-ranking/219217/8 "2003-12-17T02:09:56Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by muttrox \* > \*\*The fact that many are bogus does not mean all are. The company I work for happens to provide them, and I can tell you they are as accurate as we can make them, and as accurate as an independent auditor can verify. \*\* You can get very accurate stats for specific individual sites, but can you accurately compare one site to another? In general, you only have information about your site and specific partner sites so you can’t really do accurate comparisons to the web as a whole. For example, DoubleClick is able to gather data from all the sites which display their ads, so they can accurately compare them, but they have no way to compare to any non-DoubleClick sites. Another example are cache hosters like Akamai who may be able to profile sites they service, but again they can’t draw conclusions about the web as a whole. There are some statistical survey sites that rank popularity much like the TV Nielsen ratings, but this really qualifies as “best guess” rather than accurate comparison of server visits. Does the company you work for accurately measure traffic to arbitrary sites? If so, how? ---
**Author:** ![wolf\_meister](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/wolf_meister/32/15202_2.png) [@wolf\_meister](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/wolf_meister)\ **Post date:** [December 17, 2003, 2:58am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/website-popularity-ranking/219217/9 "2003-12-17T02:58:36Z")
**muttrox** No, the actual numbers for my website are different for websearch and alexa in all categories. They are based upon the Internet surfing activities _only_ for people who have their toolbars on their browser. So, I guess my website is twice as popular for people who use a websearch toolbar than those who use the alexa toolbar. ---
**Author:** ![sleestak](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/919ad9/32.png) [@sleestak](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/sleestak)\ **Post date:** [December 17, 2003, 6:19am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/website-popularity-ranking/219217/10 "2003-12-17T06:19:36Z")
As ftg said most website popularity data is a bunch of crap. There is another thing that will slant the numbers and that is web site caching. When I worked in the NOC at AOL we had a very funny situation come up regarding web site stats and caching. Here’s the story: A VP at Playboy called up Matt Korn, AOL’s VP of operations, complaining because AOL had [Playboy.com](http://Playboy.com) cached[#1]. The Playboy VP was upset because the caching was screwing up his marketing numbers, not showing all the hits. So we uncached [Playboy.com](http://Playboy.com). Within about 4 hours the Playboy VP was back on the phone begging to have the site cached. It turned out that they didn’t have enough capacity to handle all the traffic and their servers were _way_ overloaded. So we popped it back in and I never heard anything more about it. AOL had pretty good numbers on site popularity since it was the biggest service at the time. At the same time they were still not very good. Slee #1. Playboy was the only adult site AOL would cache.