Re: Alexa for PostgreSQL

Many of you are aware of the Alexa Toolbar. For those who aren¹t, it is a
little widget that sits inside your browser and reports all the sites you
visit (anonymously) to Alexa, which in turn ranks all the pages on the web.
You can take a look at www.alexa.com. Currently, postgresql.org is ranked
number 8,956 in popularity. While this is not a competition, for comparison
purposes, MySQL is 794.

Obviously the Alexa rating of postgresql.org is a shallow measure, but it is
one to which people in the commercial world pay attention. The rating is
fairly low right now, and some people may judge PostgreSQL harshly as a
result. Dumb though that may be, it is the truth.

My modest proposal is that as many community members as possible install the
Alexa Toolbar (known as ³Sparky) in your browsers, so that your activity on
postgresql.org, and other sites related to our world are counted in Alexa¹s
rankings. This is one small way in which we can all help increase the
visibility of PostgreSQL and the web sites visited by the PostgreSQL
community.

The toolbar is at http://www.alexa.com/site/download/.

-- Andy

Andy Astor, CEO
EnterpriseDB Corporation
andy(dot)astor(at)enterprisedb(dot)com
http://andyastor.blogspot.com

On Sat, 4 Aug 2007, Andy Astor wrote:

> Obviously the Alexa rating of postgresql.org is a shallow measure, but
> it is one to which people in the commercial world pay attention. The
> rating is fairly low right now, and some people may judge PostgreSQL
> harshly as a result. Dumb though that may be, it is the truth.

I agree with your characterization of Alexa as a "shallow measure" that's
nonetheless paid attention to by shallow people in the corporate world.
However, I would suggest that anyone considering your suggestion for how
to help first read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexa_Internet to get an
idea what's involved in this mess before they jump in.

I know Andy means well here, but the checkered history of Alexa is such
that I would never even consider installing a piece of software they have
released. And I think that may be factoring into the ranking difference
here (it's certainly not the only component, MySQL is just plain way more
popular). If I were to stereotype users of the two products, I think it's
more likely that a person whose sensibilities match those of the typical
PostgreSQL fan is aware of Alexa's badness and would refuse to install
their toolbar when compared to those whose priorities are such that they'd
consider MySQL a good solution.

As mentioned in the Wikipedia page, there is a serious self-selecting bias
to their data and I doubt that an advocacy effort would budge it
significantly enough to matter. I know I personally would rather spend my
time on debunking that Alexa's ranking is statistically useful than worry
about trying to inflate a site's rank. I'm not sure it will even work
anyway; quoting from that page: "Some webmasters claim that they can
significantly improve the Alexa ranking of less popular sites by making
them the default page, by exchanging web traffic with other webmasters,
and by requiring their users to install the Alexa toolbar; however, such
claims are often anecdotal and are offered without statistics or other
evidence."

--
* Greg Smith gsmith(at)gregsmith(dot)com http://www.gregsmith.com Baltimore, MD