Dear all, What is your experience with alexa.com? Can it be used as a reliable tool for measuring for instance the most used religious sites world wide: http://www.alexa.com/browse/general/?&CategoryID=373&mode=general&R=True &Start=1&SortBy=Popularity Do you know of other and better ways? Kind regards, Peter Fischer-Nielsen PhD student, University of Aarhus, Denmark
I've used Alexa.com in some of my research as a marker of website popularity. It seems to be a well-trusted source by industry. I'd be interested in hearing others' opinion of it. Jessie Daniels, PhD CUNY-Hunter College -- http://www.jessiedanielsphd.com http://www.racismreview.com http://www.homelessyouthservices.org On Feb 5, 2008 7:21 AM, Peter Fischer-Nielsen <pfn@teo.au.dk> wrote:
Dear all,
What is your experience with alexa.com? Can it be used as a reliable tool for measuring for instance the most used religious sites world wide:
http://www.alexa.com/browse/general/?&CategoryID=373&mode=general&R=True &Start=1&SortBy=Popularity
Do you know of other and better ways?
Kind regards,
Peter Fischer-Nielsen
PhD student, University of Aarhus, Denmark
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The important thing to remember about Alexa is that it works a bit like Nielson. It only tracks visits to a website from people who have the Alexa plugin on their browser. I think that makes it a bit skewed but many people still cite it. -- Sarah "Intellagirl" Robbins Director of Emerging Technologies www.MediaSauce.com PhD Candidate, Ball State University www.ubernoggin.com http://www.intellagirl.com http://secondlife.intellagirl.com Yahoo: Intellagirl Skype: Intellagirl SecondLife: Intellagirl Tully
I've found that Alexa/etc. aren't particularly good at baseline data, but they do work fairly well for inter-site comparison. -Fred On Tue, 5 Feb 2008, Sarah Robbins wrote:
The important thing to remember about Alexa is that it works a bit like Nielson. It only tracks visits to a website from people who have the Alexa plugin on their browser. I think that makes it a bit skewed but many people still cite it.
-- Fred Stutzman 919-260-8508 ibiblio.org/fred fred@metalab.unc.edu Co-Founder and Developer, ClaimID.com Ph.D. Student, Teaching and Research Fellow, SILS UNC-Chapel Hill
Hi I have personally used Google PageRank as a proxy for popularity. In my opinion, it is more inclusive - in the sense that Sarah pointed - than Alexa. On the other hand, PR is not an absolute ranking, so you'll need something more to compare two sites with same PR. Ismael Peña-López ICTlogy.net Public Policies for Development and ICT4D School of Law and Political Science Open University of Catalonia
You have to be careful with pagerank, unless you have access to the raw results, because google customizes results based on acct and even domain. On Feb 5, 2008, at 8:52 AM, Ismael Peña-López wrote:
Hi
I have personally used Google PageRank as a proxy for popularity. In my opinion, it is more inclusive - in the sense that Sarah pointed - than Alexa.
On the other hand, PR is not an absolute ranking, so you'll need something more to compare two sites with same PR.
Ismael Peña-López ICTlogy.net
Public Policies for Development and ICT4D School of Law and Political Science Open University of Catalonia
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jeremy hunsinger Information Ethics Fellow, Center for Information Policy Research, School of Information Studies, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (www.cipr.uwm.edu ) wiki.tmttlt.com www.tmttlt.com () ascii ribbon campaign - against html mail /\ - against microsoft attachments http://www.stswiki.org/ sts wiki http://cfp.learning-inquiry.info/ Learning Inquiry-the journal http://transdisciplinarystudies.tmttlt.com/ Transdisciplinary Studies:the book series
It's my understanding that Alexa is heavily skewed towards measuring web browsing by marketing folks because they are the main people who have installed the Alexa client. The Google PageRank displayed via the Google toolbar is notoriously slow to update, which makes it typically out-of-date. Eric. On Feb 5, 2008 7:00 AM, Jeremy Hunsinger <jhuns@vt.edu> wrote:
You have to be careful with pagerank, unless you have access to the raw results, because google customizes results based on acct and even domain. On Feb 5, 2008, at 8:52 AM, Ismael Peña-López wrote:
Hi
I have personally used Google PageRank as a proxy for popularity. In my opinion, it is more inclusive - in the sense that Sarah pointed - than Alexa.
On the other hand, PR is not an absolute ranking, so you'll need something more to compare two sites with same PR.
Ismael Peña-López ICTlogy.net
Public Policies for Development and ICT4D School of Law and Political Science Open University of Catalonia
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jeremy hunsinger Information Ethics Fellow, Center for Information Policy Research, School of Information Studies, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee ( www.cipr.uwm.edu )
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-- Eric Goldman Assistant Professor, Santa Clara University School of Law Director, High Tech Law Institute egoldman@gmail.com Personal website: http://www.ericgoldman.org Blogs: http://blog.ericgoldman.org and http://blog.ericgoldman.org/personal/
I'd say that Alexa's good for comparing Web sites on a relative basis, but that it's not good for hard numbers. Also, as others have mentioned, their methodology allows for some questioning. According to comScore, which includes a Community/Religion category in their Key Measures report, the top 10 religion sites in December 2007 were * Beliefnet Network * Salem Web Network * CHRISTIANBOOK.COM * About.com Religion * LDS.ORG * THEINTERVIEWWITHGOD.COM * CHRISTIANITYTODAY.COM * CHRISTIANET.COM * CSMONITOR.COM * GOSPELCOM.NET That list includes many non-community sites, so I'd consider it an OK approach to looking at religion-oriented publishers online. Turning to Nielsen//NetRatings, AdRelevance doesn't offer a similar "genre," but you could check individual sites' ad impressions. Both services are quite expensive and outside the budgets of most individuals -- and they raise their own methodology questions -- but they're where I'd turn for data. Heath On Feb 5, 2008 10:05 AM, Eric Goldman <egoldman@gmail.com> wrote:
It's my understanding that Alexa is heavily skewed towards measuring web browsing by marketing folks because they are the main people who have installed the Alexa client.
The Google PageRank displayed via the Google toolbar is notoriously slow to update, which makes it typically out-of-date.
Slightly off topic, Gordon Fletcher has wrote his thesis on the popularity of search engine terms. However he did a comparative study ranking the popularity of specific search terms through different engines and presented it at IR5.0 in Sussex (2004). Might be some useful data there on search engine comparisons. His paper should be on our site or available through him personally. http://www.business.salford.ac.uk/staff/gordonfletcher Cheers, Denise Denise N. Rall, PhD Southern Cross University, Lismore NSW 2480 AUSTRALIA Tues: Room T2.17, +61 (0)2 6620 3577 Mobile 0438 233 344 http://www.scu.edu.au/schools/esm/staff/pages/drall/ Virtual member, Cybermetrics Group, University of Wolverhampton, UK http://cybermetrics.wlv.ac.uk/index.html Get the name you always wanted with the new y7mail email address. www.yahoo7.com.au/y7mail
A couple of years ago, there was an interesting conflict between two of the most popular video blogs/podcasts/whatever - zeFrank and Rocketboom. ZeFrank pointed to alexa data that showed his hits much higher, despite rocketboom's claim to the contrary. Rocketboom's argument is that page hits is very different from number of times a video is downloaded. ... Richard On 2/5/08 6:27 AM, "Jessie Daniels" <jessiedanielsnyc@gmail.com> wrote:
I've used Alexa.com in some of my research as a marker of website popularity. It seems to be a well-trusted source by industry. I'd be interested in hearing others' opinion of it.
Jessie Daniels, PhD CUNY-Hunter College
-- Richard H. Hall Professor, Information Science and Technology Missouri S&T http://mst.edu/~rhall
Hitwise are pretty prominent in the area of comparative website traffic data. They produce ISP-centric measures of traffic (as opposed to Alexa, who produce user-centric measures). I would imagine that their service is expensive. Rob ------------------------------------- Dr Robert Ackland Fellow, Australian Demographic and Social Research Institute College of Arts and Social Sciences The Australian National University e-mail: robert.ackland@anu.edu.au homepage: http://adsri.anu.edu.au/people/robert.php project site: http://voson.anu.edu.au ph./fax/mob.: +61 2 6125 0312/+61 2 6125 2992/+61 438 833 525 mail: Coombs Building, 9 Canberra, ACT 0200 AUSTRALIA ------------------------------------- On Tue, 5 Feb 2008, Peter Fischer-Nielsen wrote:
Dear all,
What is your experience with alexa.com? Can it be used as a reliable tool for measuring for instance the most used religious sites world wide:
http://www.alexa.com/browse/general/?&CategoryID=373&mode=general&R=True &Start=1&SortBy=Popularity
Do you know of other and better ways?
Kind regards,
Peter Fischer-Nielsen
PhD student, University of Aarhus, Denmark
_______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
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participants (11)
-
Denise N. Rall -
Eric Goldman -
Fred Stutzman -
Hall, Richard H. -
Heath Row -
Ismael Peña-López -
Jeremy Hunsinger -
Jessie Daniels -
Peter Fischer-Nielsen -
Robert Ackland -
Sarah Robbins