pop langs website ranking

[xahlee]

In February, i spent few hours researching the popularity of some
computer language websites.

(The message can be found here:

http://xahlee.org/lang_traf/lang_sites.html
http://community.livejournal.com/lisp/42778.html
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.perl.misc/msg/59c87899c2668f4c
)

In that post, one question i puzzeled over is why PaulGraham.com's
traffic is surprisingly high, since the site doesn't seems to host
forums, computer lang documentation, or wiki type of thing, yet it is
ranked higher than perl.com, which actually host online forum, faq,
documentation, news etc. I wrote:

------------
paulgraham.com 48153 (lisp bigwig, but huh?)
Perl.com 49104
xahlee.org 80060 ↠Me!
-------------

Compared to xahlee.org, it's a ranking difference about 32 thousand!

Today, while checking the web ranking site alexa.com, they seems to
have updated their ranking algorithm to be more fair, as opposed
basing it solely on a browser toolbar that users install.

So i went over to my essay and checked the ranking again of sites i
reported. I have spent only about 20 min to cursorily go thru the
sites i reported before. It appears that, in general, the order of
sites that i listed ROUGHLY remains unperturbed, but the specific
ranking ordinal has changed rather significantly. However, there's a
big surprise.

My website is now actually ranked higher than PaulGraham.com !

LOL. Paul Graham? Bah humbug. Painters == Hackers? **** ya ass. Arc?
Eat shit and die.

PS: not having no confidence of myself, but i note that xahlee.org is
now marginally ranked higher than perl.com and perl.org, both of which
host forum/blog/wiki, news, docs, etc., while my website don't do any
of these and is all static html pages.
For those unflagging, alternative web ranking site is http://ww.quantcast.com/
.
I'll be doing some research sometimes soon on this.

Xah
(e-mail address removed)
∑ http://xahlee.org/

☄

 

[Paul McGuire]

In February, i spent few hours researching the popularity of some
computer language websites.

I seem to recall this exact same post from *last* February.

I'll be doing some research sometimes soon on this.

... and no "research" was *ever* posted!

"Posting" is not the same as "contributing".

-- Paul

HATE. LET ME TELL
YOU HOW MUCH I'VE
COME TO HATE YOU
SINCE I BEGAN TO
LIVE. THERE ARE 387.44
MILLION MILES OF
PRINTED CIRCUITS IN
WAFER THIN LAYERS
THAT FILL MY
COMPLEX. IF THE
WORD HATE WAS
ENGRAVED ON EACH
NANOANGSTROM OF
THOSE HUNDREDS OF
MILLIONS OF MILES IT
WOULD NOT EQUAL
ONE ONE-BILLIONTH
OF THE HATE I FEEL
AT THIS MICRO-INSTANT
FOR YOU. HATE. HATE.

 

[Roedy Green]

alexa

I was shocked at the detailed information Alexa (owned by Amzon.com)_
had about my website. I wrote them and asked how they got it. They
said volunteers use a special browsing tool that reports website
visits. They use that to generate the information.

I suppose then one way to bump your stats is to use the tool for
maintaining your own website.

The weakness of this approach is it is unusual group of people who
will voluntarily submit to having their usage spied on. These are not
a typical group or a large group.

Google has AdSense that will let them know in huge detail the hit
stats on a huge hunk of the web, but I don't know if they publish that
information anywhere.

 

[Jan Claeys]

Op Wed, 23 Apr 2008 04:07:31 +0000, schreef Roedy Green:

The weakness of this approach is it is unusual group of people who will
voluntarily submit to having their usage spied on. These are not a
typical group or a large group.

Hello, planet Earth calling?

I guess around 90% of internet users don't care, mostly because they
don't know this is happening (how many people do you think read EULAs?).

Alexa's & Google's & other (often less legal) profiling tools come with
lots of pseudo-freeware applications these days...

 

[xahlee]

I have updated the computing sites popularity ranking, based on both
alexa.com and quantcast.com.

The whole report nicely formatted in HTML is here:
http://xahlee.org/lang_traf/lang_sites.html

The following is a summary of some highlights.

the relative popularity of the following sites is roughly this:

sun.com
java.com
php.net
slashdot.com
Mysql.com
gnu.org
wolfram.com
Python.org
cpan.org
xahlee.org
Perl.org
Perl.com
paulgraham.com
haskell.org
novig.com
emacswiki.org
franz.com
lispworks.com
Gigamonkeys.com
schemers.org

This is just sites i'm familiar or used to or comes to mind. There are
of course many other popularly used computing sites.

Alexa's data is more reliable than quantcast. Quantcast often has very
bad info as of current. However, alexa's data does not seems reliable
in some absolute sense.

The one question that puzzles me is why gnu.org is ranked so high,
since as far as i know it isn't that much of a active site for news,
blog, wiki, or anything. The only reason i can think of is that lots
of software points to it for the GPL, but this can't explain all.

Note that adding together the traffic of cpan.org, perl.com, perl.org,
they are about a bit higher than python.org, as expected.

I'm not clear what's the relative popularity of sun.com, java.com, and
php.com. Before alexa changed their ranking algorithm recently,
php.net is ranked high above sun.com (a ranking of 500 vs 900), but
now alexa shows that sun.com has about 10 times more visitors than
php.net. Quantcast's data on these 3 sites is more bewilding. For
example, it estimates that java.com has 5 million unique visitors per
month, while giving sun.com 1.5 M only, and php only 78 k. I think
quantcast's data here is quite fuckd.

Xah
(e-mail address removed)
∑ http://xahlee.org/

☄

 

[Ben Bullock]

In February, i spent few hours researching the popularity of some
computer language websites.

One way to do such research is for you to publish the actual number of
hits on your website. It's also easy to analyze logfile data with free
tools like analog or awstats, and publish the number of unique
visitors, pages hit, bandwidth, etc. It would also be possible for you
to work out how accurate the Alexa numbers actually are compared to
the numbers you see in your logs.