You'd think with all the issues that currently plague the problem, SOMEONE would have come up with a solution…
What problem is that, you ask? It's the Alexa Problem.
Right now, folks turn to Alexa to gauge how popular their site is. They do this in spite of the fact that Alexa has a few issues:
1. It requires the Alexa Toolbar, which most folks don't have installed.
2. The folks that do have it installed are folks like SEOs or other folks very interested in tracking a given site's popularity.
3. Alexa tracks only top domains, so Astrology.yahoo has the same rank as News.yahoo and the same rank as the main page of Yahoo!. That's obviously wrong.
So Alexa results are far from an accurate sampling of random internet users, they're a report of the actions of a biased set of users using a specific tool. It's like determining who should be president by only allowing people who drive a particular brand of car the right to vote. Any pollster would toss Alexa results out without even a microseconds hesitation, yet they persist. Hell, i dismiss any references to Alexa the same way that i dismiss glowing reviews from David Manning.
The problem is that Alexa, as flawed and biased as it may be, is the only tool that currently provides any clue about traffic. Google Trends doesn't, and honestly, suffers many of the same problems (no actual numbers, domain collapsing and noise, limited audience, etc.). Granted, Trends is more about exposing search terms rather than domain traffic. It'd track people coming through google entering in "unitedheroes.net", but not folks looking for things on my site.
Likewise, we can't really set up a service that asks sites to report back the number of visitors, since they'll lie.
i almost wish that someone would set up an open source version of Alexa. Something where folks could grab a little anonymizing plugin that would simply report back a visited URL. Yeah, people would spam it, but you can do things on the server that can detect and control that.
i'm sure it's a harder problem, but c'mon, it's a wide open market.
Well, yahoo search does track clicked-on search results. Set up something from there and I'll switch from alexa in a second.
… the other side of the coin is, of course, that I use google search partly because google doesn't include "google.com" in all their search result links. The other "partly" is that I use yahoo mail (and thus have to accept yahoo's cookies), and yahoo search uses those same cookies.
Dunno what search engine I'd use if I had to accept google's cookies as well.
Hetta, I keep telling you, it's not you we lust after, it's your demographic.
Aye, but you keep records? And hand them over to people with legal documents?
Oh OK, I know that I have a semi-static IP address and that anybody can infer as much as they like from that, but doing the cookie dance is adding insult to injury.
Anyhoo, I'm all for yahoo search adding "and this month (week / day) your site is the 150010th most popular!" to their lineup. You can do it, and you can put ads on it. Alexa/Amazon have ads all over those particular pages.
(I quite liked the "People who are interested in unitedheroes.net also bought the … Pro Court Height-Adjustable Portable Basketball System with 44-Inch Backboard" bit on the alexa traffic details page.)
Seriously, the NSA has already installed exactly the gear we want to do this. They really need a b2b arm to sell off the extra data they don't require. Intelligence analysts need Porsches too, you know. Why get your site metrics from some lame fractional-traffic provider when you can get the true word from The All Seeing Eye?
As part of the Gold package, they'll also cross-check your phone bill against the calls you actually made, and let you know about any discrepencies. In fact, they already do this… except for the "letting you know" part.
I wish it would stop eating my links.
This is what the NSA has been up to:
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,70908-0.html?tw=wn_index_3.
Oh my. Yahoo has an astrology subdomain. I'm not sure what else to say.
So, let's make a business based on the model where we supply the equipment for a statistically significant portion of the high-volume hubs, and configure the equipment to leak us the domain (and subdomain) -specific traffic information.
And everyone's banking password, while we're at it. We get oodles of good data, and the top-tier folks get free equipment and no-questions-asked weekends in Vegas. And if anyone starts to make noise about us making off with their valuable surfing data, we'll point out that A) anyone up the pipe from them could be doing this and they wouldn't know, B) we've got a corporate motto that says, "Do not much evil, just enough that Callous and JR get hot cars and can pay to bring back Firefly", C) the NSA has already been doing this for years, and they certainly don't have the "fairly-minimal-evil" clause, and D) shut your cake hole or your packets will never see a valid CRC again.
But we'll call it Web 2.0 and keep me from talking to people, and it'll all be Ok.