charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com wrote:

"Thomas Dalton" wrote

...

Why do people put so much weight on Alexa's rankings? It's based on very biased self selecting sample...

Short answer: it's a good indicator of trend. Especially that you can now apply smoothing to the stats.

Actually something weird appears to have been happening, with all the Chinese portals going up and down at the end of 2006. (WP went right down, and was running slow: China was going up.) The fact that one can see such effects suggests that Alexa rankings are sensitive to some tidal movements. What you cannot conclude is that the whole system is correctly calibrated. But it seems to me that it is possible to read these runes.

People do know that there was a significant earthquake off Taiwan last week that damaged undersea telecommunications cables and severely disrupted internet access to/from/in East Asia, right? Sometimes local phenomena in the physical world still play a role.

--Michael Snow