Internet Statisticals

So I mozied on over to Alexa.com today to look into who’s who in Pittsburgh’s website scene. I found out that I’m ranked a bit higher than I would have expected, somewhere around 550,000. According to a quick Google search, there are almost 65 million websites out there right now, so I feel pretty good about my place on the totem pole.

Then I tried figuring out what the top site was – first I tried Google.com, which was #3, next I tried Microsoft.com, which was #18 or something, and then realized that Yahoo would be the answer. After that, I followed a link to see who the top 10 were.

  1. Yahoo! No surprise there. Before Google came to power, Yahoo! was most of the Internet, and so it seems to reason that even if they’re a dying dinosaur, it takes awhile for such a big monster to die.
  2. Microsoft Network (MSN) Hotmail alone probably gives MSN enough clout to hang around the playground, even if the rest of the kids don’t like them very much.
  3. Google This makes me wonder if using the Google Toolbar is reflected as using Google.com, because if it were, surely Google would be the most used site. It’s the beginning of every internet experience for me.
  4. YouTube Another Google service, eh?
  5. Windows Live More Microsoft…
  6. Myspace Seriously? So people are still going here? I can only assume it’s because they have computers without keyboards and so all they can do is refresh the page they chose to set their browser to upon first buying the machine.
  7. Baidu.com The only non-English site on the list, this appears to be a Chinese search engine. Given the sheer number of Chinese and the fact that everything else on this list ends in “.com”, this brings up an interesting idea: is the population of the Internet primarily made up of Americans?
  8. Orkut Another Google service but this really surprises me, as I didn’t think many people at all used Orkut.
  9. Wikipedia This is surprising simply because I thought it would be higher up in the list. These days, nearly any search result will produce a Wikipedia page somewhere in the top three results.
  10. Facebook Three social networking sites in the top 10. I hate the Internet.

What can we glean from all of these stats? That search/portal/email sites like Google and Yahoo! are the primary reason for the Internet. Social Networking seems to be the second biggest reason people are getting online. With only one entertainment-based site, YouTube, it would seem that being amused isn’t a big priority here inside of the Web (World Wide).

Let’s all have a sandwich.

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