Everybody knows that Alexa, Compete, and other web services that track web site traffic are inherently flawed. Because they compile third party data instead of looking at your actual server data, you can never be sure that the statistics you're reading are accurate. But hey, if you really want to see whether Engadget is more popular than Gizmodo, they're the only game in town, right?
Now there's a new player in the web traffic comparison game. Google has added the ability to search for websites in Google Trends. While there's no guarantee that the stats Google spits back are any more accurate than the ones you'll find from Alexa or Compete, the service does give you one more source for comparison. Search Engine Land reports that Google grabs its numbers from a combination of sources including search traffic, anonymous Google Analytics figures and other third party marketing data.
Just a few days after Microsoft rolled out a new traffic prediction feature for Windows Live Maps, Google has followed suit with traffic predictions for Google Maps. Both services use historical traffic data to predict likely congestion points and travel time in the future. But there are two major differences:
Windows Live Maps will suggest the best driving directions for avoiding traffic, Google Maps will not
Google Maps lets you choose the day of the week and time of day to see projected traffic patterns, Windows Live Maps will not.
While both services are pretty useful, what we really want is a service that will combine both of these features. Mapquest, we're looking at you.
Web site ranking service Alexa has long been one of the most used, and one of the least trusted ways to figure out how popular a web site is. That's because it's difficult to determine a site's actual traffic without access to the owner's private data. But Alexa's reliance on a small army of users who installed a browser toolbar had an obvious tendency to skew the results toward tech-heavy web sites.
Now Alexa is using data from "multiple sources" and not just the toolbar to create more accurate rankings. The company isn't really saying what those sources are, but many web sites will see an adjustment in their Alexa traffic reports. Alexa also isn't admitting that its rankings were incorrect before, just that they were "different."
You'll also notice that you can only get graphs for the last 9 months of traffic. Alexa is recalculating older data and will add multi-year graphs soon.
Over the past year or so, pretty much every major online mapping service has added some sort of real-time traffic detection system. But while these systems will let you know which roads to avoid, for the most part they don't do a great job of presenting you with alternatives. Now Microsoft has added a new technology called Clearflow to its Live Maps service which will let you choose a route based on traffic.
What this means is you can now choose to search for the shortest route by time or distance, and you can also have Live Maps redirect you to avoid heavily congested areas. The system is available for 72 US cities at the moment.
The system predicts traffic by time of day, weather, sports events and other factors, so it doesn't rely solely on real-time conditions to determine the best routes although live data is taken into account as well. While the interface is clean and easy to use, we don't see an easy way to let Live Maps know what time you plan to make your trip, which sort of defeats the purpose.
MapQuest has finally gotten around to adding a feature that Google Maps has had for over a year: real-time traffic info. When you search for a location or driving directions on MapQuest, all you have to do is click the traffic button in the upper left corner of the screen and all of the major roads will be highlighted with color codes showing the traffic conditions.
One thing that MapQuest has added that Google Maps lacks is construction and incident alerts. If you hover your mouse over the exclamation points or construction icons you can find about traffic accidents and other conditions that could affect your travel time. Clicking on the icons brings up more detailed information.
All you have to do is fire up Google Reader, click the "Add Subscription" button and type a web site name or keyword. Google Reader will spit out a list of blogs and news sites along with the number of users who have subscribed to that site using Google Reader.
These numbers are only kind of useful. After all, Google Reader is just one of hundreds of RSS readers. And only a small percentage of web users actually subscribe to RSS feeds. But Google Reader is probably one of the more popular readers out there, and this data provides yet another way for people to argue about which web sites are more popular than others.
For the record, Download Squad has over 9,000 subscribers according to Google Reader. This represents a fraction (although not an insignificant one) of the overall number of people who subscribe to our RSS feed. But then, since we're a technology-oriented blog, a higher percentage of our audience knows about and uses RSS feeds than audiences for many other sites.
Over the past few weeks DLS has had the chance to check out Yahoo's GO 2.0 application for mobile devices at home and on the go with a Blackberry 8800 and a Nokia 6126. So how did the application fare out? Is it worth having on your device? What were the benefits and downfalls? And what would we change?
We have covered Yahoo's GO mobile application since it first was released in Beta to the public at the beginning of the year. We initially tried the mobile application out on a Motorola RAZR and Blackberry 8700 among other devices, and agreed that Yahoo had developed something rather special. However, it wasn't until we tried it out long term in our everyday lives that we really understood the benefits to the application.
Yahoo GO was developed by Yahoo for users to instantly search and connect to email, news, weather, stocks, finance, and Flickr, all through an intuitive interface Yahoo has named a carousal. After tooling around with the initial Beta release, Yahoo has released yet another version that reduces load times, and adds in some new tools like a calendar and address book to help in day to day time management. However a big integration has to be Yahoo GO's ability to use GPS on select devices, perfect for when on the go, and what makes this application stand out.
You've got an appointment in Manhattan tomorrow, so you visit Google Maps and print out the driving directions today. (Don't ask why you're driving from Brooklyn into Manhattan, this is just hypothetical, OK?). You're going less than 10 miles, so it should only take about 23 minu...what???
Like most online mapping services, Google Maps calculates estimated travel times based on speed limits, not on actual road conditions. And if you live in a busy metropolitan area like Los Angeles, San Francisco, or New York, you know that you have to more than double the times Google Maps spits out.
Well, a few months ago Google added traffic updates to its maps. And now it looks like the company's done something useful with that information and added a second estimate for driving time to your directions. Type in any two addresses (in limited metropolitan areas at the moment) and Google will tell you how long it should take to get there under ideal conditions, and during rush hour. Of course, there's no way to account for traffic accidents.
Could we soon see some crazy new developments from Twitter? Maybe not, but we might see some increased usage.
Twitter's cofounder Biz Stone recently said that Twitter is on the road to raising its first round of venture capital funding. Big news from a company who's traffic rate has leveled off, and is not yet profitable. Twitter has attracted about 226,000 unique visitors in May, compare that to 94,000 in April, but down from 397,000 in February. Still not bad for a company that only launched last winter. Twitter is extremely focused on growing their network of users before making money, and they really don't have an evident business model as of yet.
As Stefanie Olsen mentioned, could Twitter be snapped up by Google before funding goes through, as Blogger was?
The New York State Department of Transformation has their Google on. They've created an intuitive Google Maps mashup that makes traveling through the state a little easier.
A Real-time transportation status map plots live camera feeds, roadwork, critical incidents, road closures, weather or alerts, and traffic speeds. A legend on the left side of the map allows users to plot one topic at a time to get a birds eye view where their might be trouble. Clicking on the pinpoints gives the user a larger description of the problem, including times for construction or lane reductions.
It's a great site to bookmark and load up just before taking a trip through the coverage areas. Unfortunately, it's not that great while you are already driving along, but then again, you can always call up a buddy and have him or her check the site out for a report!
If you find yourself in a traffic bind while in NY, you can always check out some mobile applications such as the DOT Traffic Management Center's Advanced Travel Information System, that is accessible by mobile devices and shows real time traffic cameras. We've also covered the WCBS mobile application that covers over 400 roadside traffic cams in the New York, New Jersey and Connecticut areas.
Just when you thought the world of web analytics was a little bland, Basil arrives to spice things up a bit.
Basil takes out the pages of raw web traffic data that we once had to sift through and analyze, and does all the hard work for us. They provide easy to use clean interface design [reminding us of Mint] to make it easier for figuring out what the popular pages of your website are, and what search engine delivers the most traffic to your site.
Basil makes it easy to track the pages and data you want to check out by proving a dashboard of four major topic areas, visitors, pages, referrers, and search engines. Data is compiled in easy to read reports, you can check out a demo on the Basil website.
Basil web analytics is available for $25 U.S. which allows for installing the software on one domain.
Never be late again with real time streaming traffic on your mobile device. This way cool mobile traffic report from 3rd Dimension is a free application that lets users keep on top of real time traffic reports through live videos. The application will only run on compatible mobile devices like Blackberry's, Palm Treos, and Motorola RAZRs. Don't know how we missed this one, but it launched back in November, and is sure to have drivers in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut driving for joy.
The WCBS Cellmate mobile application has running access to over 400 roadside traffic cams, and is available to cell phone subscribers that have data plans on Sprint, Cingular, T-Mobile or Verizon. If you don't have an unlimited data plan watch out, most videos are real time, with some updating every few seconds.
dnScoop is an online tool that bunches many popular domain lookup tools into one.
It's a location where users can check out the traffic of a particular domain, see the domains history, popularity, PageRank, count inbound links, and perhaps the coolest feature, get a site's dollar value report.
Start off by entering your chosen URL, and then choose a category from the 10 supplied. dnScoop will spit out the results pretty quickly after running through a number of checks and balances.
For instance, in a search on downloadsquad.com, we see that the domain has a Google PR value of 6 with 1,390,153 inbound links. Alexa traffic ranks are provided, as well as the number of indexed pages downloadsquad.com has in major search engines. Last but not least, the most interesting feature, the value report. dnScoop takes all of the above results and calculates them with a special formula to give them a dollar amount. In this case, downloadsquad.com is valued at $5,654,000. And of course you can show this amount off with your very own valuation button to add to your website.
It's a neat figure to show off to your friends, but I wouldn't base any real life transactions on dnScoop data.
Google has added real-time traffic reports to Google Maps. Up until now, only mobile client users had access to traffic data.
Traffic information is available for a limited number of locations at this point, but odds are if you live near a fairly well-populated city, (think New York, Portland, Salt Lake city), there's probably some data for your area.
The interface is pretty simple. In fact, it might be too simple. There's a new tab next to map, hybrid, and satellite that says traffic. If you click on it, some of the major roads and highways will change colors. Here's the key:
Green: traffic is moving at more than 50 miles per hour.
Yellow: traffic is moving at 25-50 miles her hour.
Red: less than 25 miles per hour.
Gray: no data is available.
The thing is, there are a lot of gray areas right now. Both literally and figuratively. Because there are many patches of road that are grayed out, even in areas that are covered. And when you click the traffic tab to add those colored lines, you lose a key piece of data: the names of the street underneath.
Still, it's a good start, and I'm looking forward to seeing how Google refines this service in the future.
TorrentFreak is reporting that three top BitTorrent tracker sites--The Pirate Bay, mininova, and Torrentspy--have accomplished the inevitable and entered the Alexa 200, the top 200 most-trafficked sites on the web acccording to Alexa. Torrentspy has the highest rank at 153, followed by mininova at 165, and The Pirate Bay barely squeezing in at 198. While nobody argues that Alexa's rankings are the picture of accuracy, it does give a pretty good indication of web trends, and this seems like a pretty big trend. TorrentFreak speculates that it was IsoHunt's recent (temporary) shutdown that bumped these sites into the top 200 (with its spillover traffic going to them), and the Alexa chart would seem to confirm that. Now that IsoHunt is back up, I wonder if it will gain back that traffic, knocking the other sites down a notch.
