Info 202 Fall 2011

In his thesis “Through the Google Goggles: Sociopolitical Bias in Search Engine Design”, Alejandro M. Diaz’s writes:

“. . . after conducting a large-scale investigation, what Barabási instead found was that the distribution of links on the Web, rather than being “egalitarian” and “roughly equal,” actually follows a power law (i.e., Zipf or Pareto distribution). This means that a small number of pages—what are now called “hubs”—collect an enormous number of backlinks, while the vast majority of documents are linked to by few or no sites at all.” Referencing Googlearchy he adds that, “. . . more, “almost all prominent sites are run by long-established interest groups, by government entities, by corporations, or by traditional media outlets.”

Observing the top 100 sites by traffic according to the estimates at Quantcast (see lists below), this claim doesn’t quite hold up. Just over 1/3 of the sites in the top 100 don’t fall firmly into any of these last three categories. However, Nearly half of the top 100 sites are corporate entities. Factoring in the close relationships between theses companies suggests that there is a large consolidation of corporate interest represented. Traditional media sites trail at 13% and government-related sites barely make it onto the list.

The number of unique visits per month for Google is estimated at 155 million while TypePad is at 18 million. In other words, the number 1 probably gets around 9 times as many visitors as the number 100 site. One thing is clear: the power law is definitely in effect.

Some questions and observations emerge from this review:

• How much are default browser page settings responsible for tipping that stats associated with a site?
  
• There are notable topic redundancies in the list. For example, no fewer than 3 sites appear to be entirely devoted to reporting weather.
  
• Oreck, a vacuum cleaning products company, quizzically clocks in at number 37.
  
• Wikipedia, operating solely on donations and grants, has a remarkable ranking at number 7. Quite an accomplishment compared to the amount of capital behind every other site in the top 10.

city-data.com (some government-supplied data)

nih.gov

Categorized as a publicly traded company or having a parent company that is a corporation.

google.com

facebook.com

youtube.com

yahoo.com

twitter.com

amazon.com

live.com

microsoft.com

ebay.com

ask.com

bing.com

huffingtonpost.com (AOL)

answers.com

linkedin.com

aol.com

adobe.com

reference.com (ask.com)

go.com (Disney)

paypal.com

comcast.net

walmart.com

mapquest.com

godaddy.com

oreck.com

match.com

manta.com

att.com

windows.com

photobucket.com (FOX)

flickr.com

target.com

myspace.com

apple.com

chase.com

cnet.com

wellsfargo.com

comcast.com

bankofamerica.com

inbox.com

hp.com

monster.com

usps.com

careerbuilder.com

mtv.com

fandango.com

jcpenney.com

norton.com

netflix.com

bestbuy.com

msn.com

weather.com

foxnews.com

about.com (NYTimes Company)

whitepages.com

cnn.com

nytimes.com

tmz.com

yellowpages.com

people.com

merriam-webster.com

nydailynews.com

usmagazine.com

Defined as non-profits, privately held companies, or sites that don’t precisely fit the established three categories above.

wikipedia.org

blogspot.com (owned by Google)

blogger.com (owned by Google)

ehow.com

wordpress.com

craigslist.org (privately held)

tumblr.com

pandora.com

imdb.com

dailymotion.com

wikia.com

yelp.com

webmd.com

legacy.com

vimeo.com

hubpages.com

metrolyrics.com

squidoo.com

reddit.com

grindtv.com

drudgereport.com

coolmath-games.com

evite.com

urbandictionary.com

wunderground.com

howstuffworks.com

chacha.com

bleacherreport.com

twitpic.com

deviantart.com

weatherbug.com

zimbio.com

cafemom.com

buycheapr.com