Alexa

, obviously owned by Amazon and using Google to power its search function, has interesting graphs on the pageviews and reach of some websites. Interestingly, my personal homepage is now barely in the top million (which I consider impressive), but only the top 100.000 have publicly visible graphs.

A very interesting graph I obtained is this:

msn.com vs. google.com vs. yahoo.com vs. ebay.com vs. amazon.com

So the top three sites are yahoo.com, msn.com and google.com; followed by ebay, passport (what is passport used for except hotmail?) and amazon (English pages only, the worldwide fourth is a chinese search engine). I was really suprised to see MSN and passport that high, I would have expected google to be #1 actually. But I obviously underestimated how many people didn’t change the Internet Explorer start page…

Unfortunately alexa seems to be broken somehow - around 50% of my requests will result in a blank page I have to reload… and right now, I can’t get any graphs anymore.

Update: alexa works better now again, and I was pointed to Alexa Top Sites with some more top-ranked sites.

Oh, and I wonder how these stats are generated. I first thought they are using click counters in search engines (most likely in google?) but OTOH that wouldn’t explain yahoo or MSN being that high…