__/ [ Kelsey Bjarnason ] on Thursday 28 December 2006 19:57 \__
> On Thu, 28 Dec 2006 10:08:37 -0800, John Bailo wrote:
>
>>
>> http://www.w3counter.com/globalstats/
>
> Hmm...
>
> "This report shows statistics aggregated across all active websites
> tracked by W3Counter. It was last generated on December 17, 2006 based on
> an analysis of 6,974,802 distinct visits across 4,018 websites."
>
> "4,018 web sites" is pretty damned insignificant. As is 7 million visits;
> it wouldn't surprise me much to find that, say, microsoft.com got that
> many in a day. Where's the breakdown of _which_ sites are tracked this
> way? The breakdown showing that they're not tracking msn.com and
> microsoft.com, thus wildly skewing the stats?
>
> Of course, there's other issues with this as well. Take, say,
> www.download.com. They have a moderate collection of Linux software.
> However, I rarely go there, because virtually everything I need or want is
> in the repositories - unless I'm using Windows, in which case, I'll go
> there. Result? They're going to show something like 100:1 usage of
> Windows over Linux, even for me, despite the reality being pretty much the
> exact opposite.
>
> Web stats are completely meaningless unless one can demonstrate both that
> the sites in question are equally interesting to similar proportions of
> Windows and Linux users (e.g. the site appeals to about half of the users
> of each OS), that the sites drive the users of each OS to make comparable
> numbers of visits, and that the sites don't themselves impose a bias
> (msn.com is not going to get a hell of a lot of Linux users heading to it.)
>
> Of course one then also has to remove the biases from proxying, caching
> and the like, account for exactly how much browser ident changing is going
> on, etc.
>
> Lastly, the coverage has to be complete enough to be meaningful; 4,018
> sites and 7 million visits doesn't seem to mean much unless that's an "in
> the last five minutes" report. Even if it is, collect the data for a
> month, let's see the spread over, say, a million sites, after removing the
> biases and skews.
>
> You do have those figures, right? I mean, you wouldn't be posting this
> stuff here knowing, going in, that it's worthless, so you must have
> already done all those steps, right? So why post the raw data, why not
> post the meaningful results?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lies%2C_Damn_Lies%2C_and_Statistics
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