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!

Some entity, AKA "xahlee@gmail.com" gmail.com> wrote this mindboggling stuff:
(selectively-snipped)

well well, so your site is more popular.
You can make it even more popular, you know.
Just rename some lame article about how to make a kitty-litter
into mytinypussy.html and your hitrate will become astronomical.

Cor

On Apr 22, 4:41 pm, "xah...@gmail.com" gmail.com> wrote:

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

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

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

-- Paul

"Paul McGuire" austin.rr.com> wrote in message
news:315e13cc-3d21-4f2f-8503-835ea79069e2@x35g2000hsb.googlegroups.com...
On Apr 22, 4:41 pm, "xah...@gmail.com" gmail.com> wrote:

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

--->I remember it too. Xah is quite the self-promoter. Massive
cross-posters don't have anything to say for me.

Gerry Ford wrote:

So don't do it.

On Tue, 22 Apr 2008 14:41:33 -0700 (PDT), "xahlee@gmail.com"
gmail.com> wrote, quoted or indirectly quoted someone who said
:

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.

--

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:

xahlee@gmail.com wrote:

Alexa claim to have accurate data on lots of sites but I just tried to
correlate their data with the exact data on our web server and the
discrepancies are huge. For example, combining our number of absolute
visitors with their measure of "reach" for our site indicates that there
are 58 billion internet users.

So their data are not even order-of-magnitude accurate. The only web analyst
I ever met was an astrophysicist so this does not really surprise me. ;-)

In comp.lang.perl.misc xahlee@gmail.com gmail.com> wrote:

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.