Alexa and statistics again

As you may know, Alexa is a company that tries to divine the relative ranking of one website when it comes to traffic. It uses some functionality that is associated with the Internet Explorer browser. This is a browser that comes standard with the Windows operating system and it used to be absolutely dominate the global market. This market was eroded by the Firefox browser, Firefox has carved out a niche for itself and has a worldwide use of more than 15 percent.

The distribution of the use is different from country to country; in Germany Firefox is much more popular. The distribution is also different from website to website; for OmegaWiki a big percentage of people use Firefox; in November the traffic from both browsers was evenly split. This means that the reporting of Alexa has a bias that severely affects its accuracy.

For OmegaWiki Alexa provides the best statistics we currently can provide you with. We have a technical issue that limits the usefulness of our webaliser statistics. Because of the name change from WiktionaryZ, you do find that there are separate OmegaWiki and WiktionaryZ statistics at Alexa.. I wrote them about it, and Alexa will merge the data in one to two weeks.

Any way, better statistics in two weeks, both from Alexa and from our webaliser. It will be interesting to see more realistically if and to what extend our traffic is evolving.

Thanks,
GerardM