If you’ve ever built a web site, you’ve probably done your best to make sure people know about it. It’s no surprise, then that there’s no shortage of sites out there ranking the popularity of all the sites on the internet. We’re all familiar with Google’s Page Rank where the bigger number from 0 to 10 is better and Alexa’s ranking system in which your site’s ranking is out of all sites on the internet, making a ranking of 1 the best. Today, AllTop linked out to Nmap.org’s visualization of the 300,000 most popular web sites on the internet, and JoeTech.com made it in the image, right next to Mashable, as did Lnk.gd (my URL shortening site).
As you may be able to tell from the image, Nmap grabbed the favicon image from all of these sites and used it to represent the site in the visualization.
The area of each icon is proportional to the sum of the reach of all sites using that icon. When both a bare domain name and its “www.” counterpart used the same icon, only one of them was counted. The smallest icons–those corresponding to sites with approximately 0.0001% reach–are scaled to 16×16 pixels. The largest icon (Google) is 11,936 x 11,936 pixels, and the whole diagram is 37,440 x 37,440.
Here’s a breakdown of how JoeTech.com and Lnk.gd compare (in this visualization) to some sites you may recognize. In parenthesis are the dimensions of the site’s image relative to the complete image.
JoeTech.com (416 x 416):
It’s worth noting that the image they grabbed (from some time ago, I would think) was the OLD chat bubble favicon while the current one is the head part of my logo.
Lnk.gd (1664 x 1664):
Mashable.com (640 x 640):
CNN.com (1488 x 1488):
Whitehouse.gov (224 x 224):
GoDaddy.com (1056 x 1056):
While I think JoeTech.com should definitely be in the image (based on my Alexa ranking), I have to question where it stands proportionate to the likes of Mashable and The White House. I haven’t taken a look at the algorithm used by Nmap, though, so perhaps there’s a secret sauce I don’t know about.
In any case, it’s nice to make the cut and even nicer to see the visualization of all the web’s traffic. I have a poster from 1999 that visualizes the web’s traffic in a similar way and a quick comparison of the two shows some striking changes in how the web is viewed today. What was your favorite site to visit back in 1999 (if you were online then) and what are your favorites now? I think it was Google and Ebay for me in 1999 and today it’s Google and Facebook.
