User talk:OsamaK/November 2012
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Alexa Bot
Hi Osama! Long time, no chat!
I'm curious as to what you might think about generally replacing alexa statistics throughout English Wikipedia with quantcast numbers. In the industry, Quantcast numbers are considered to be much more accurate, and Alexa numbers to be highly questionable. At the very least, I wonder what the possibility might be of updating these numbers in infoboxes to include both, rather than Alexa alone.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 11:35, 2 April 2012 (UTC)
- Hi, Jimmy! I think it will be easy to adapt the code to any ranking services but it seems that Quantcast only provides US-based rankings. If this is actually true, I wonder if we should adopt it and be US-centric. What do you think?--OsamaK (talk) 06:15, 3 April 2012 (UTC)
- Hmm, that's a good point. I don't know. Maybe if we report both with a notation? Like, give the Alexa one first, and then the Quantcast one (with "US only" in parentheses). We should probably seek advice from others!--Jimbo Wales (talk) 11:04, 3 April 2012 (UTC)
- Jimbo - what's a good source for industry analysis of Alexa vs Quantcast vs others? I'm a little surprised that Alexa is questionable, since it's affiliated with Internet Archive and the Wayback Machine (or was, anyways). --Lexein (talk) 15:07, 3 April 2012 (UTC)
- I don't think it was ever affiliated with Internet Archive and the Wayback Machine. It is an Amazon company and has been for many years. I should clarify that I don't think it is that Alexa is in any way morally questionable. It's just that their methodology and accuracy has been questioned by many. Here is a typical example. Quantcast, on the other hand, directly measures traffic for lots of sites who are signed up to be "Quantified". See This list to see many examples of quantified sites. For those sites, the data is as accurate as you are going to find anywhere, because they directly measure the traffic with an invisible 1x1 pixel. They extrapolate in various ways (I don't know exactly) to get traffic figures for sites that are not Quantified. Quantcast simply has a lot more data to work with and will therefore be a lot more accurate overall.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 09:42, 4 April 2012 (UTC)
- Ah - hm, dunno where I got the idea about an Alexa/IA connection. Fair enough. -Lexein (talk) 02:37, 6 April 2012 (UTC)
- I added the suggestion here.--OsamaK (talk) 06:31, 7 April 2012 (UTC)
- Ah - hm, dunno where I got the idea about an Alexa/IA connection. Fair enough. -Lexein (talk) 02:37, 6 April 2012 (UTC)
- I don't think it was ever affiliated with Internet Archive and the Wayback Machine. It is an Amazon company and has been for many years. I should clarify that I don't think it is that Alexa is in any way morally questionable. It's just that their methodology and accuracy has been questioned by many. Here is a typical example. Quantcast, on the other hand, directly measures traffic for lots of sites who are signed up to be "Quantified". See This list to see many examples of quantified sites. For those sites, the data is as accurate as you are going to find anywhere, because they directly measure the traffic with an invisible 1x1 pixel. They extrapolate in various ways (I don't know exactly) to get traffic figures for sites that are not Quantified. Quantcast simply has a lot more data to work with and will therefore be a lot more accurate overall.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 09:42, 4 April 2012 (UTC)
- Jimbo - what's a good source for industry analysis of Alexa vs Quantcast vs others? I'm a little surprised that Alexa is questionable, since it's affiliated with Internet Archive and the Wayback Machine (or was, anyways). --Lexein (talk) 15:07, 3 April 2012 (UTC)
- I hope its not to late to share my views.
- Hmm, that's a good point. I don't know. Maybe if we report both with a notation? Like, give the Alexa one first, and then the Quantcast one (with "US only" in parentheses). We should probably seek advice from others!--Jimbo Wales (talk) 11:04, 3 April 2012 (UTC)
Ok firstly I also read that the founder of the Internet Archive started Alexa. Maybe on Wikipedia. Secondly I don't believe Quancast is US Centric from experience! MyWapBlog.com is an article I am working on at the moment. They reached in the top ten sites in Indonesia on Quantcast. I also believe that it is a good stats service. The founder of MyWapBlog.com is from India as well. He did not even have the quantcast button on his site until he found out about this. I read that this feature has been added to OKbot on the Infobox Template page. So has it? And how do I use it?