Top 1,000 Sites: Interesting and Odd
May 29, 2010
You can get Google’s version of the Top 1,000 Web sites via the Double Click Ad Planner. There are some anomalies. I could not spot Google.com nor YouTube.com. Microsoft’s sites were not rolled up but presented as individual sites; for example, Live.com at #3, MSN.com at #5, Microsoft.com at #6, and Bing.com at #14. Same handling of Adobe. The approach makes sense. A notable red herring link was Com.com which points to Cnet.com. A surprise that Ca.gov was on the list at 565 and the UK’s Direct.gov.uk was # 803. I did not spot any of the much-loved US government Web sites. The National Institutes of Health was #176. The IRS was #288 ahead of Hulu.com at #292. NASA was #604. The Department of Education was #762. The USGS turned up at # 978. The other US government entities were presumably outside the Top 1,000. Google’s star crossed social networking service Orkut was #45 with 45 million visitors. Facebook, according to the Google report, has 540 million visitors. To get an idea of the variance between the Google data and Nielsendata, compare some high profile companies. I looked at Nielsen’s April traffic data for Apple. Nielsen reported 61,158 million uniques. Google reported 72 million. Similar differences pepper traffic league tables. Which is less incorrect? I average which is close enough for horse shoes in my opinion.
The “truth” appears in log files. The problem is that comprehensive log file analysis is a challenge in many organizations. Net net: Some Web site operators may not know the hard count.
Stephen E Arnold
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