So, you know the site ranking value on the Netcraft toolbar? If you don't - basically every page in the world has a rank according to NetCraft and that rank gets shown to you in the toolbar. I thought this was interesting - interesting enough to spend some time thinking about how accurate these numbers are or aren't. I even did some research to find out - and, in the end, I came to the conclusion that they're not very accurate.
Actually, random inaccuracy isn't such a huge deal, but the NetCraft numbers are actually more "skewed" than "inaccurate." In particular, it's the methodology that skews the results. To see what I mean, consider the position of NetCraft in the pecking order (#7) - just a few entries above eBay. Don't get me wrong, NetCraft's statistics and the toolbar are cool and stuff, but more traffic than eBay? That's suscpicious, don't you think? Unless you take into account that all the informational links on the toolbar go to Netcraft and the only population surveyed are those with the toolbar (Ah-Ha!) - in which case, it's actually possible since each click on a toolbar button (prominent on the browser window) counts as one "cha-ching" for the Netcraft site listing.
We can also tell that the Netcraft values are skewed in favor of FireFox usage patters (different from IE usage patterns). This is because a statistically large portion of the population running the Netcraft toolbar on FireFox - how can we tell that? The numbers tell us. Because Google is the top site for Netcraft (#1) and is the default homepage for firefox; Alexa (the spyware people) who use a similar methodology for ranking sites but only run on IE show Google at position 3. In Alexa (again, only IE) - we would expect a high incidence of MSN since it's the default page for most incarnations of IE. It's #2 on Alexa and #19 on Netcraft. What does that mean? Higher ratio of firefox to IE...
Posted by Ed at December 17, 2005 09:03 AM