Competitive research and traffic analysis is an important part of launching a new site or web app.
I did a quick study that uses source code search sites as the subject for comparison. Here IÂ highlight some key metrics from these two Firefox add-ons:
Google Toolbar
toolbar.google.com
Alexa Toolbar & Sparky
www.alexa.com/site/download
I found these sites through my delicious bookmarks, search, and the “Similar Pages” and “Related Links” features of both of the above add-ons
Source Code Search Site |
Alexa Traffic Rank |
Google PageRank |
2 |
7 |
|
34642 |
6 |
|
113268 |
5 |
|
175389 |
4 |
|
179759 |
4 |
First, you have to take these rankings with a grain of salt. Google’s PageRank seems to honor the difference between google.com (10) and google.com/codesearch (7). Alexa’s Traffic Rank (2) does not honor the difference and uses the ranking for Google’s main domain instead.
Another useful metric is unique visitors seen here from compete.com:
siteanalytics.compete.com/koders.com+krugle.com+codease.com/?metric=uv
For a quick look at how the search results look for these sites, I plugged in Spring’s verbosely named AbstractTransactionalDataSourceSpringContextTests. Here are some links to the results:
www.google.com/codesearch?q=AbstractTransactionalDataSourceSpringContextTests&hl=en&btnG=Search+Code
www.koders.com/default.aspx?s=AbstractTransactionalDataSourceSpringContextTests&btn=&la=*&li=*
www.krugle.org/kse/entfiles?query=AbstractTransactionalDataSourceSpringContextTests
codase.com/search/text?join=abstracttransactionaldatasourcespringcontexttests+&scope=join%2Fjoin
If you’d like to mention more sites like this, please share in the comments!