August 29, 2002

4:12 PM

Alexa's Top 500 Websites - Accurate or not, here is Alexa.com's list of their top 500 ranked websites - globally. This has been touched on both earlier today and back in April. Today's top ten sites iclude two korean sites, one japanese, one chinese, and six us-based sites. Also a more-clear definition of Alexa's Ranking system is here, complete with biases listed (such as IE users only, Alexa Users only, etc).
posted by kokogiak (24 comments total)

Smutserver's at number 69. Guh-huh.
posted by interrobang at 4:23 PM on August 29, 2002

mec.clix.pt: 763rd.

metafilter.com: 10,072nd.

I sense a conspiracy.
posted by mr_crash_davis at 5:12 PM on August 29, 2002

The reviews for the number 3 site (daum.com) are:

Daum?, 8/27/02
Reviewer: SaTANSDAILY
More like Dumb to me. www.satansdaily.tk www.satanswhores.tk

Daum rulers, 8/25/02
Reviewer: Flicker
I like site it rule!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Flicker wbemater-http://www.premierwagering.com

PAL/SECAM Videos 2 DVD, 8/20/02
Reviewer: Convert PAL to NTSC
We convert VHS, VHSC, SVHSC, Video8, Hi8, Digital8, or MiniDV to DVD at www.videos2dvd.com

List Your Company and Site, 8/8/02
Reviewer: turkeyDIRECTORY
List Your Company and Site http://www.buildturkey.com DAUM is Number 1

Does anyone review this stuff?
posted by internal at 5:40 PM on August 29, 2002

If you think of Alexa more as an entertainment site and less of it as an informational site, it becomes much more fun to use.

Of course, our methods for determining "best song," "best movie" or best anything are just as specious and flaw ridden as Alexa's methods, so...
posted by Joey Michaels at 5:46 PM on August 29, 2002

Here's the conspiracy: only those who use the alexa toolbar (which is spyware) participate in the rankings. Far from scientific.
posted by skallas at 6:14 PM on August 29, 2002

yah... i don't know anyone who uses alexa. i tried it out once but didn't really see the point, found out it was spyware and purged it from my system.

i rank 218,718th. i'm an underachiever with only 300,000+ visitors per year, oh boohoo.
(recently passed the 1 million mark, go me!).
posted by t r a c y at 6:36 PM on August 29, 2002

The various sites I write for all rank in the 200,000 to 2,000,000 scale also. If it weren't for the fact that humanity should be protected from most of my writing, I would be concerned.
posted by Joey Michaels at 6:53 PM on August 29, 2002

Speaking of spyware, did anyone else find it strange that Gator ranked so high? I can't imagine anyone actually visiting their page in those kind of numbers (unless they were trying to, say, figure out how to get rid of gator). It makes me think popups are included among pages visited, even though the user never chose to see those sights.
posted by Kellydamnit at 7:08 PM on August 29, 2002

sights=sites. Serves me right for blindly trusting the spell check.
posted by Kellydamnit at 7:11 PM on August 29, 2002

It's interesting that so many korean sites are in the top 20.
posted by crunchland at 7:53 PM on August 29, 2002

kellydamnit:

It might be that people who like alexia's spyware also like gator... or at least don't know how to get rid of it.

Actualy, I wouldn't really call Alexia's stuff 'spyware', I mean people who download it know what it does... the whole point of alexia is to agrigate data.

It's not like it's slipped in the way gator, vx and other crap is.

btw: woohoo! autopr0n is 346,301!
posted by delmoi at 7:54 PM on August 29, 2002

t r a c y: It would be nice if you had images of what your fonts looked like. On your website.
posted by delmoi at 7:57 PM on August 29, 2002

Are there really many (hell, any!) people who intentionally download Gator? I thought it only came with another program, like the late audio galaxy, ezboard, and so on.
posted by Kellydamnit at 8:01 PM on August 29, 2002

t r a c y: It would be nice if you had images of what your fonts looked like. On your website.

erm, i do... on the font site, which you can get to from the front page using the "content" drop down menu. if you can't see them it must be a funky router issue between your isp and my server.
posted by t r a c y at 8:13 PM on August 29, 2002

Who writes those brief descriptions, anyway? Good god...
posted by adamgreenfield at 8:14 PM on August 29, 2002

delmoi: Actualy, I wouldn't really call Alexia's stuff 'spyware', I mean people who download it know what it does...

I wouldn't assume that. Here's the toolbar download page, no where does it say it logs every site you goto. Same with the google toolbar. You have to go and read the privacy policy to get that information. What percentage of internet users read all the legalese of everything they download? 2%? 1%?
posted by skallas at 8:45 PM on August 29, 2002

It's interesting that so many korean sites are in the top 20.

Whether the Alexa rankings are a testament to how many Koreans have spyware on their systems or not, I'm not sure, but last time I checked, Korea was #1 worldwide for both broadband penetration and percentage of population online. There are probably half a dozen or more Amazonesque ecommerce sites here that do massive, roaring business. The bubble, net-wise, never burst here.

As far as infrastructure goes, I compare it to Sydney, Australia, where I lived before this, where it took 4 months from application to installation of my 512/256 DSL account in 2001, which rarely worked, which like all DSL services currently available in Aus (again, last time I checked, was capped at a ridiculous 3Gb per month), and which cost me A$140 a month with an installation fee of several hundred dollars.

Here, deep in the wilds of Kyunggi-do province, on the outskirts of Seoul but by no means inside the conurbation, my 4Mb DSL service (which has not once in one year stopped working, and for which I pay (by means of comparison I use the same currency) about A$30 per month, uncapped was installed the next day after I applied, with no installation fee. A colleague of mine in the same complex has an 8Mb service, also uncapped, for about A$20 a month more.

This place, for all its deficiencies, is internet-junkie heaven.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 9:53 PM on August 29, 2002

Skallas, the Google toolbar only logs your surfing activity if you have advanced features enabled, specifically the site rank, which is, for me at any rate, practically useless.

Sidenote: the Google toolbar has a new cool feature under "experimental features" it suppresses OnUnload() thus killing most exit pop-ups. Also, the Google toolbar does not appear to have any active spyware in it. Ad-aware did do something to it, because it is listed as broken in IEs objects folder, but it still works fine. However I once installed the Alexa toolbar and Ad-aware went ape, I think I delete something like 13 components and a half dozen modifications to the registry. Ugh.

That said, I've got a question, forgive my ignorance, but what language is www.163.com in, and can anyone here tell me what it's about?
posted by Grod at 10:17 PM on August 29, 2002

Gator is not only the Kazaa-riding spyware program we know and love. The company also produces an online form filler-outer, which automatically fills out all the fields for you in any forms you come across on the Internet. This is the program that people voluntarily choose to install, for those of you who were wondering. I mean, except for those people who want to see all of Gator's unbelievable offers!
posted by grrarrgh00 at 10:50 PM on August 29, 2002

what language is www.163.com in, and can anyone here tell me what it's about?

chinese.

it looks like some sort of all-in-one yahooesque portal... i can see cellphone graphics and presumably ringtones up at the top, news headlines below that (based on the fact that the links point to news.163.com),as well as classified ads, free e-mail, auctions, games, etc. it's all in the urls, which have english in them.
posted by chrisege at 10:53 PM on August 29, 2002

Alexa's methodology is so flawed as to be virtually useless.

Their sample is large, but hardly representative of the global Internet population (as the absurdly high ranking of Korean sites shows).

Secondly, just as Amazon tracks what items you've browsed and recommends items based on data collected from others with similar tastes, websites that are popular with Alexa users are then recommended to other Alexa users, a self-fulfilling pattern that boosts these sites' popularity in the ranking.

However, there are so few sources of global web audience data that Alexa tends to get quoted by default.
posted by plenty at 11:05 PM on August 29, 2002

Could someone please explain this to me? Look at the title and compare it to the content of the page. I'm completely bamboozled. I think I posted a poem called "Red Magic Marker" once to some yahoo group mailing list or something. I'm not upset, just kind of confused that the title for that poem ended up on the website for Georgia Tech? Uhm... pleasantly surprised perhaps I am?

Okay wait. Maybe whoever made this page used this page as a template for the other one? Which would explain why the title is the same for both pages. I found all this out by the way from perusing Alexa Web Search which knows more about me than I care to know.
posted by ZachsMind at 12:00 AM on August 30, 2002

Well, one of my sites ranks in the top 150,000...

What intrigues and perhaps impresses me is, it looks like for a lot of these sites, including t r a c y's at 218,718, have a fairly good site description (i.e. "A girl and her mouse. Personal site with a weblog."). For her site and the ones of mine I've looked up, they're not culled from META tags or anything.

Could it be someone at Alexa actually has the job of working their way down the list to write these things?

On Preview: D'oh! They're swiped from the ODP. Nevermind.
posted by pzarquon at 2:52 AM on August 30, 2002

"A girl and her mouse" was Tracy's front page title tag for a long, long time, plus she used it in other search engines where you can choose what info shows for your site. It was that way for maybe a year or more (she's such a lazy bones!), so it's not an alexa or odp original.
posted by zarah at 4:00 AM on August 30, 2002