New tool for website comparisons Options

[Everyman]

A new proxy scrapes three things with one click:

Google's PageRank
Alexa's traffic rank
Yahoo's external backlink count

Nonprofit and no ads. It's been up for two days, and is already popular in Japan for some reason. Probably because I use a TLD lookup table before parsing the URL that includes all the country domains in it. In other words, the thing should work okay on all URLs.

[bragadocchio]

Interesting program. Thanks.

The "rough number of daily visitors" here, estimated from Alexa, is 8527.

[bwelford]

Hey that's a neat tool. The "rough number of daily visitors" for my website seems to be about double what Funnel Web tells me from my traffic logs. Of course I'm not sure whether one or other or both count in spiders in these estimates.

[bragadocchio]

And the "rough number of daily visitors" shows about half of what I see from logs on another site.

I wonder if we should peek into how their estimates work a little more.

[cre8pc]

Agreed. Fun, easy, free tool. The daily visits calculation is a mystery though...

[Grumpus]

Alexa's daily vists calculation isn't particularly mysterious - but it's also not particularly accurate, either. It works the same way our Nielsen Ratings do for television.

Basically, Alexa knows how many toolbars are installed on browsers. They also know how many web surfers are on the web. So, if they take how many visits a site gets from a person with their toolbar installed and multiply it out to the total number of people surfing the web, you get how many visitors a site gets every day.

The difference, though, is that your Neilsen families are not only a representative group of all TV viewers, but they are also geographically representative. I show like Crossing Jordan or Judging Amy is more popular in the New England states than other areas because they take place there. Neilsen is set up to take into consideration these geographical variances.

The Alexa toolbar, though, is randomly "out there". I don't know if it's still true, but back 3-4 years ago, it was widely popular in Korea - to the point where something like 40% of all web surfers in Korea had it installed (or something like that). This skews the ratings toward sites that would be of interest to people in Korea. It's also more commonly installed by people in the web industry because of it's site ranking feature. So, it is also skewed toward web sites that are of interest to people who have web sites.

So, because of that skew for web related sites, our traffic estimate is going to be on the high side.

G.

[Everyman]

Grumpus is correct.

The formula I use to calculate the traffic estimate was borrowed from the information I found here.

I suspect that about half of the time the estimate is either as little as one-half the real traffic for that site, or as much as twice the real traffic for that site. The count is for "unique" daily visitors, which should exclude fetches for images. And bots don't use the toolbar, so they wouldn't get counted either. Alexa apparently only counts one IP per day per site. It's also supposed to be a 3-month moving average.

It's very, very rough, needless to say.

[Grumpus]

I never saw that page that adjusted based on business type. That's pretty nifty. Still not very accurate, but a heck of a lot better than I described it (which was based on material I picked up a while ago when looking into just what Alexa was up to).

Fun stuff.

G.

[ConversionRater]

That's a quick and handy tool, especially if you use a browser that doesn't support the various toolbars.

I'd also recommend the set of tools at http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/

[minstrel]

The source of this tool was a bit of a surprise, at least to me...

Yes, www.microsoft-watch.org is indeed the latest creation of Mr. Conspiracy Theory, Daniel Brandt, himself... keeping the universe safe from everyone except Daniel Brandt, one search engine at a time.

[Black_Knight]

Here at Cre8asite we know Daniel as Everyman and a fellow member of the community. He's been here since 17 Nov 2002 (though not continuously of course ), and whilst he certainly asks a lot of questions regarding Google's motives and methods, that surely is something that Google have invited in so openly referring to themselves as the company that 'does no evil'.

Asking questions is a useful way of making us all reexamine things, and build in safeguards. One thing that frequently occurs to me is that Microsoft were strongly rumoured to have not only been interested in aquiring Google, but to have actually made an offer or two.

I personally discovered, when thinking about this, that I'd be a lot more nervous of sharing information with Google that Microsoft might later be able to buy along with the company. And with an IPO, who knows exactly who will have access to Google's data (and technologies) in the future.

The one great truth is said to be that all things change. However, the one thing that doesn't change is the past. Information given in the past cannot be un-given or withdrawn when someone else manages to buy access to it...

[minstrel]

oops :oops: (mental note: next time, check first to see who the poster is before replying)

I guess my point was that I found it curious that Daniel, whose mission seems to be to protect us from search engines and to condemn the way they arrive at search engine rankings, should be promoting a tool to assist us in determining rankings on those same search engines.

[bwelford]

<wild thought>You could of course decide that you would change identities every 24 months and reinvent yourself. A clean slate. New User names. New domains. Avoid the mistakes you made in your last incarnation. The sky's the limit.</wild thought>

I think I've been working too much today. Have a good weekend.

[Black_Knight]

Yup, David, but then one could just as easily say that he's continuing to make us look at the 'scores' the SEs assign, and giving us a tool that helps us spot the discrepancies and ask ourselves more questions.

Or it could just be a classic irony.

[minstrel]

giving us a tool that helps us spot the discrepancies and ask ourselves more questions.

good point...

[matturn]

I can't get the URL posted to work, nor can I see how it can work...

[minstrel]

That's odd, matturn.

What happens when you try? error messages? or just nothing?

What OS? browser?

[bragadocchio]

Hi matturn,

I just checked and it seems to be working fine for me. Maybe it's something related to the setup on your computer, or maybe it was just down for a little while when you looked.

Which one are you trying? The google-watch one or the digital point tools?