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Maybe iwon.com and search.msn.com can battle it out for 2,174th place.

Is hotmail nasty? I used to have a hotmail account right until MS bought them out. Then I just retained my yahoo email addresses. Now I'm paying for yahoo mail plus, but probably would have kept the service even if yahoo was bought out, simply because I'm worn out, worn out from being fed up with MS. Or maybe I'd move over to gmail completely. It depends who needs more help to maintain balance power, MS or Google. I always flock to the weaker side. By the way it's clear why MS wants to buy Yahoo. According to http://www.alexa.com/site/ds/top_sites?ts_mode=lang&lang=en Yahoo and Google are top. In a world where Silverlight is meant to replace Flash, if Yahoo and Google don't push silverlight but prefer flash instead, MS simply can't shove their will down everyone's throat, and can't make it a marketing success. It all depends on rankings. And people like me are so stuck in their ways, it's hard for MS to come up with anything "better" than Yahoo to make me switch to them and use their pages instead. It's bad enough that windows talks home any chance it gets. Even in maps, I prefer Google maps compared to whatever MS has, simply because Google isn't supplying my operating system, so there is a smaller chance of hidden easter egg-like backdoors being exploited by them.

they are invalid due to apathy and ignorance. In practically every case, you could take a mildly competent developer, throw the code at him, and have it valid in next to no time.

So... you've just insulted all the web programmers at Google, Yahoo, Apple, YouTube, Windows Live, EBay, Amazon, etc.?

Well, at least MSN passes the validator. They must have competent programmers!

Alexa confirms it.

On Friday afternoon, Drudge Report ranked 545th, compared with TechCrunch's ranking of 1,784th, according to Alexa's new math.

Have a look at this. Wikipedia has about 100 times more traffic than slashdot.

Probably a web portal that they've managed to not run into the ground quite as badly as MS.

they'd try to turn Yahoo! into another Microsoft division and destroy what they were after in the first place.

That, I totally agree with. I've already submitted a letter to Yahoo's feedback page letting them know that I won't be using their many services anymore if the MS deal goes through, because I know that a service decline is inevitable. What good can come of letting a company that's already been proven incompetent running a similar business run your business?

Slashdot didn't evolve into a "Microsoft sux" since you joined. It always was one. You're still here after all these years.

It's self moderated and you're right -- posts that disparage Microsoft and discount Ballmer do fly to the top of the moderation. That's not because some corporate sponsor has a geek lab in Bangalore with 1,000 blogdrones astroturfing the moderation. It's because Slashdot attracts geeks and that's what the geeks really think. That's honest opinion survey for you. I think a lot of that is because the observation that "M$ sux" actually is insightful, and the Ballmer's futile thrashing of a chair in helpless frustration over Google really is funny.

When you add that slashdot is still one of the popular sites on the intertubes you have to ask: does Microsoft have a problem?

And remember, an answer to every Microsoft problem is available all over the web.

They have to be running scared now. Vista has been out for a year and a half and OEMs are still introducing new machines that not only don't run Vista -- but never will be able to, and people are buying them up like crazy.

Yes, how very true. The MAFIAA should realise that waging war against trackers is futile. Perhaps they should look at this graph to see their lack of success.

In the Alexa top 100, Yahoo! only has two domains, .com and .co.jp. Google has 10 domains in only the top 50, from .com to .co.in. I'm not counting sister sites like Flickr or Orkut here, just the search front pages in the various localizations.

If you total Yahoo!'s top 100 (just the two) you get 29.41% reach (3 month average), but Google's domains total to 44.42%, and that's only the top 50. So in reality, Google's search front end has 50% greater reach than Yahoo!'s search front.

So, amiright?!?

Yahoo is ANYTHING but sinking. Yahoo.com is still the number one most visited site on the web (check alexa). Now, Google happens to be number two, followed by youtube. Who in their right mind wouldn't want the top three websites? I'D shell out $45B if I had it.

The reason why Yahoo! has managed to keep its top Alexa position despite clearly lagging behind Google is because it redirects regional pages to subdomains. For example, Yahoo! Singapore) redirects to sg.yahoo.com. To Alexa, this counts as a part of yahoo.com and the visit is attributed accordingly, the exception being yahoo.co.jp, which has its own domain probably because Japan is one of the few regions where Yahoo! is outperforming Google.

Google on the other hand, has separate domains for all its regional versions. Take a look at Alexa's top 100 list: a good 21 out of 100, or one fifth, of them are really just Google in different languages, and we are not even counting subsidiaries like YouTube yet. I'd say that Google has long surpassed Yahoo! as the most trafficked website on the net. Yahoo! is just barely holding on to its top Alexa ranking even despite this discrepancy in the tabulation.

The exact same thing that Microsoft would be acquiring. Granted it would be more of a benefit to Microsoft than to Google at this stage in the game, but who wouldn't want the #1 Website ranked in the world?. MSN had the position for the first half of 2007, but now they're crashing hard, and they never could beat out yahoo in the five years before that. Now the question is this: Which would you rather see, MSN fall further from the #5 slot, or Microsoft acquire Yahoo and be in control of the current #1 position?

Granted, M$ takes control of Yahoo, it's probably not going to be #1 for much longer (I know I'd be dropping my Yahoo mail accounts and probably joining my wife on Gmail), but since when do investors care what's going to happen, they want immediate returns on investment. And having their company say "We just bought the #1 spot" sounds real good to stupid masses with money to burn.

But then, that's just my $0.02USD (has the Peso out-done us yet on the conversion rate?)

Google and yahoo are neck and neck (with google slightly ahead for the last while). That gives google 1 & 3, or 50% vs 30% if you combine youtube + google.

Now look at http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=YHOO&t=2y&l=on&z=m&q=l&c=GOOG

Yahoo on the way down and Google (relatively) up.

Sure, Google could buy Yahoo for a quick rush, but in the longer term (1-2 years) yahoo will just fade by themselves unless they do something very interesting (which they have not done in a long time).

Yahoo is ANYTHING but sinking. Yahoo.com is still the number one most visited site on the web (check alexa). Now, Google happens to be number two, followed by youtube. Who in their right mind wouldn't want the top three websites? I'D shell out $45B if I had it.

Not that it would happen, but imagine if Google acquired Yahoo. They'd have vast resources of hardware and user accounts at their dispense - two things that Google especially wouldn't mind having. A merger between Yahoo and Google groups? News? Oh, and did I mention they're the number one site on the web?!

A more likely option, avoiding the anti-trust nonsense, would be Google purchasing some stock in Yahoo, or the two coming to some sort of mutual agreement such that Yahoo can consolidate and focus funds and Google gets some new toy.

By no means is it a dumb idea for either of them. The only person who loses is Microsoft, and I think everyone can agree that's an acceptable loss.

This controversy is only known to a handful of geeks and will be forgotten a year from now.

The chart in the article, of the fraction of people on two social networking sites, shows what's really happening. There's Myspace and Facebook, and then there's everybody else. Whether Myspace and Facebook decide to interoperate is a major business decision. For everybody else, what matters is interoperating with Myspace and Facebook. Few people care whether Orkut and Bebo interconnect.

Social networking sites have a life cycle, like nightclubs. If successful, they become cool, they grow, the losers move in, they become uncool, and they decline. Has-been sites include Geocities, EZBoard, Nerve, Tribe, and, of course AOL. Facebook just caught up with Myspace last month, after a steep rise, but right now Facebook is headed downward.

the thing that really ticked me off is when they stopped using the direct links but started abusing tinyurl and dwarfurl and social engineering to cloak the links, it would be about 20 minutes of coding and testing for the /code guys to fix that (show you the end-target of a redirected link) which would at least stop the social engineering attempts.

The biggest problem is it works, check myminicity.com on http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details/myminicity.com alexa. If this is encouraged it won't be long before you get 100's of these clowns drowning out all normal conversation. We've already lost usenet and email to spam, I'll be damned if linkspam is going to kill online fora, kill them while they're small. Set an example. I'm sure if the original inventors of spam email had their offices burned to the ground on day #2 of their enlightened campaign it would have set back the idea of mass mailings a couple of years.

Also, /. isn't the only forum that is being pestered like this, I already saw myminicity.com links in other places. If their business model is to harness their users into linkspamming I think they deserve to go down in flames.

Yeah, well... It's easy to spot "trends" when you draw the trend lines yourself, by hand.

Take a look at the actual Google Trends graphic for wikipedia. Look at the Alexa data and the blogpulse data.

Now, honestly tell me if you can find an "inflection point" in them... I tried and I can't.

According to Alexa, Kvasir is #25 in Norway, while Google is #2 (Facebook being #1).

See: http://www.alexa.com/site/ds/top_sites?cc=NO&ts_mode=country&lang=none

http://www.alexa.com/data/details/main?url=cybertriallawyer.com has some interesting information about the company, including the contact e-mail address jwd@cybertriallawyer.com. Given that the name of the head honcho is John Dozier, this seems to be his work account.

Alexa shows a small drop over the past week, but not larger than several other dips over the past few years.

According to Alexa , Wikipedia has actually grown substantially in terms of traffic and viewership, with reach up 12% in the past 3 months. It's inevitable that with several million articles, the number of "missing" encyclopedic ones drops, and thus fewer new articles are created. You can't judge whether something has "peaked" based on fewer accounts being blocked and soforth. Rather than saying it's peaked, it looks more like it's starting to stabilise in terms of quality, while still growing in terms of readership and reach.

hmm alexa rank of 666 today?!

http://alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?url=slashdot.org

Check Alexa stats.
http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details? site0=habbohotel.com&site1=slashdot.org&site2=&sit e3=&site4=&x=0&y=0&h=300&w=610&h=400&w=700&z=3&ran ge=3m&size=Medium&y=r&z=3&url=usopen.org

Sparky. It's called Sparky. http://www.alexa.com/site/download

the url is (from the firefox toolbar's plain text javascript)

http://data.alexa.com/data?cli=10&dat=ns&url=$url

so in that case.... http://data.alexa.com/data?cli=10&dat=snbamz&url=h ttp://www.slashdot.org might work. Come on and follow the link so Taco gets happy :-) (make sure to use a safe browser please, I cant guarantee that its a safe site)

The point is that Alexa is flawed, without a doubt. But it seems more flawed from the point of view of a group which deliberately makes itself all but impossible to measure. And frankly, if we're not willing to provide the information necessary for advertisers to make informed choices, we're going to continue to be ignored, both on the web and on television. (Yes, I do realize that Nielsen is specifically flawed with respect to DVRs - but even if they weren't, how many members of this site would voluntarily install habit-tracking software on their TiVo? How many members of this site would call for a boycott of TiVo if it installed it for them?)

Yes, Alexa is flawed because they just take their numbers at face value, they don't do any statistical analysis of their numbers. Instead of just freaking out as taco suggests, show them numbers from a company that does care about demographic distribution and statistical analysis. Use Compete.com. Here's Alexa's graph for slashdot vs digg using Alexa's metric called reach which is apparently percent of people with their toolbar installed who visited the two sites; and here's Compete's using a statistically computed number of unique visitors in a month to each site. There are other metrics available from Compete as well, but this is the core metric.

Seems more to me like they are saying they are spying on you:
http://www.alexa.com/site/help/privacy?&qterm=&p=D ownload

Alexa is a ranking system to measure how popular a certain website is on the Internet. A user, however, must have the Alexa toolbar installed for Alexa to measure site rankings accordingly. As of right now, Slashdot is ranked 558 out of 1 million+ sites that Alexa tracks.

Note: you don't need to install the toolbar to figure out Alexa rankings. Check out the Search Status extension for Firefox. I have mine sitting at the bottom right corner of the browser to display me PageRank and Alexa rankings.

Maybe this is why: http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details? url=slashdot.org http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details? url=digg.com

Maybe this is why: http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details? url=slashdot.org http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details? url=digg.com

Their traffic has been dropping for a while: http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details? url=anonymizer.com

Which of those is worth a flip exactly? Anything on the scale of wikipedia or slashdot and how much more hardware does Rails need for equivalent performance to a site done in perl or Zend PHP with an op-cache?

Twitter is on the scale of Slashdot, as you can see on Alexa.. You can read about how their site is built and why people expecting to scale are using RoR.

As far as perl or PHP goes, I'm sure Ruby on Rails is about the same to scale. I think all of them have the problem that they're database-centric, so your real scaling issues are about your database and the limitations of a two-tier architecture.

Social networking sites have a life cycle, like nightclubs. They open, they get some cool people, if they're successful they get more cool people and become the place to go, they get greedy and let too many people in, they become uncool and fall out of favor, they limp along in obscurity for quite a while, and finally they close. Formerly-cool social networking sites include AOL, the Well, Geocities, EZboard, Nerve, Tribe, and Friendster. Myspace hasn't grown in a year, and Facebook is still on the way up. See the relevant Alexa traffic ratings.

As the article points out, the early adopters tend to be in the 20-30 age range, and over time, usage of sites filters down to college and then high school students. The article points out that this happened for Myspace and is happening to Facebook. But they see this as a "class" thing, not a life-cycle thing, because they didn't look at enough sites and their history.

The next generation of social networking will probably be phone-based. Helio, the expensive "don't call it a phone" device with Myspace integration, should have Facebook integration instead. Look for an iPhone-based social networking system.

Somebody is going to do phone-based social networking well and make billions.

For those who might be interested about ZK versus Echo2, OFBiz forum Hot or not hot: Visit Alexa and compare zkoss.org and nextap.com. ZK are twice, if not triple, popular than Echo2.

Sorry, I'm a Linux lover and all, but the sheer volume of crap in your post forces me to respond. I'll take a few choice tidbits:

Microsoft knows that they have peaked in the software industry, and they are desperately seeking a way to continue their unprecedented growth.

Except that it IS precedented by 20 years of.... growth!

We all know it's not going to happen; most of Microsoft's hardware products (aside from keyboards, joysticks, and mice) have been duds in the marketplace.

Eh, like the XBox? An "I'm feeling lucky" searching for "XBOX sales wii" returns this website - and even if the sales figures are a few months old, they're nothing to shake a stick at.

They tried search engines and failed miserably, even though the MSIE default page was MSN.

I have a tough time calling the 4th most popular website in the United States a "miserable failure". No, they aren't FIRST, but that's a long way from some of the worst.


I think the Novell deal is something different though. I think that they want to focus more on services and become a solutions provider like IBM did, so that way no matter WHAT the techology choice is, Microsoft still get at least a slice of the pie, and then other forces at Microsoft who are desperate to maintain their positions and power at Microsoft are using this development to spread anti-Linux FUD.

Wow! Something insightful! No, not really. It's been industry mantra for at least 5-10 years: "SERVICES! SERVICES! SERVICES!". They're a tad late to the game, but they certainly aren't going the way of DEC.

Everything above may be totally off base, but really, I do think that these moves are out of desperation because they see the strength of their stock eroding very quickly.

Hmmm. Up by almost 50% in the last year. Yep. Definite erosion. They're probably getting ready to jump out of the window.

Your post is actually very reminiscent of another post I've seen from time to time here on slashdork. It usually starts like this: "It is official; Netcraft now confirms: *BSD is dying..."

Luckily, Alexa knows that 70% of digitalhome's traffic is from Canada.

No, but very few sites have to deal with 11000 page views per second, as Twitter reputedly does.

Not to doubt Twitter, but this would have it as the second most popular website on the net, behind Google: http://www.alexa.com/site/ds/top_500?&qterm=&p=Dev Corner, as MSN currently averages 9,700 page views per second (I should know).

I'm slightly sceptical.

That being said, I realize that Twitter's concept of page views is slightly different, and lighter than, MSN's.

They're not just using Alexa's *data* - they're using Alexa's *servers* to assemble the data and create the images. Do a view source on the following example URL:

http://www.statsaholic.com/craigslist.org+friendst er.com+myspace.com+orkut.com+blogger.com?y=r&r=5y& z=50

In the source of the page, you'll find the inline image is pulled directly from:

http://traffic.alexa.com/graph?w=695&h=340&r=5y&y= r&z=50&u=craigslist.org&u=friendster.com&u=myspace .com&u=orkut.com&u=blogger.com

ie. Alexa's does the work getting people to install their toolbar, logging the URLs those people access, crunching the data, and even assembling the final display of that data. Statsaholic steals all of the above work, plus the bandwidth for all the images they're hotlinking without permission, despite Alexa's wishes.

What does Statsaholic add to that? Nothing, really. A slightly cleaner template and their own ads.

And yet, if the AC post below is to be believed as from Alan Graham, we should be seeing this theft of resources despite the owner's wishes as some kind of champion-of-the-people thing.

I ask you again, Alan - are you fine with me taking your articles to use on my own server without your permission (and hotlinking any related images from the ZD server), then making a profit of it with my own ads?

It is EXACTLY the same thing.

Don't worry, it's just Zonk again. Is it too much to ask for editors to learn how to use hyperlinks without screwing them up, and failing that, preview before publishing to the front page of one of the top 500 sites in the world?

Frankly, it's embarrassing.

Myspace and Youtube? Puhleeze! Everyone knows that web portals are the wave of the future, not this flashy user-generated videospace nonsense. If you don't know what I'm talking about, type webcrawler.com into Mosaic and dogpile it!

The Internet Archive doesn't crawl many sites anyway: they get most of their crawl data from Alexa Internet.

A ton of money? Any contracts of Wikipedia logo or value-added-services (as in, content pushing) services pay to non-profit foundation, that has underwent audit scrutinity, and has community-trusted people on board. Wikipedia is much bigger operation than answers.com, serving many more users ( http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details? site0=www.answers.com&site1=wikipedia.org&site2=&s ite3=&site4=&y=p&z=1&h=300&w=500&range=6m&size=Med ium&url=www.answers.com ), so a _share_ of answers.com revenues would not necessarily cover costs. Of course, Wikipedia is _very_ efficient, as for a site of such size. Please, don't spread lies, though they are easily verifiable to be as such, still, some people may accidently take them for granted.

nice site, seems to be bigger than some of the ones mention in that article http://traffic.alexa.com/graph?c=1&f=555555&u=mihd .net&u=box.net&u=dropboks.com&u=mediamax.com&u=ope nomy.com&r=6m&y=r&z=0&h=400&w=700

Alexa analysis. None of those jokers have reliable data, so you have to take them all together and synthesize the answer mentally. Note that Alexa extends to the present day while Quantcast goes only through the end of January.