One of the facts that I thought I had acquired from Wikimania yesterday was that Wikipedia was the fifth ranked internet site in the world. So this morning I get to wondering what the top four were and so ask Google, who points me straight back to Wikipedia, where I find that Wikipedia is actually sixth, just ahead of Twitter. I had correctly guessed that Google, Facebook and YouTube would be up there, but I missed Yahoo! (a portal) and had never heard of Baidu (a Chinese search engine). Blogspot, my own home, comes in at a respectable 17.
Interestingly the top ten includes some very different kinds of things. And while there might be a number of search engines, a number of portals and a number of shops up there in the upper reaches, there is only one encyclopedia and there is only one Facebook - which leads one to wonder why the internet market churns out oligopolies for some things and monopolies for others. No doubt there are people out there beavering away on this very question at this very moment.
The primary source for all this stuff seems to be http://www.alexa.com/, an outfit owned by Amazon (it's a small world at the top of the internet tree) which gives away some data about the internet and sells the more serious stuff. The top 500 being free and being found at http://www.alexa.com/topsites/global.
Decided that I would not get into the tricky statistical detail of exactly what is meant by being top.
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