web usage graph

[kregg]

A graph of worldwide internet usage-is there such a thing? I didn't see any via google. There are graphs of current transfer speeds in different areas but I didn't see any mapping numbers of people or quantity of data transfer by region or worldwide-in real time.

[Cap'n Refsmmat]

I don't know if such a thing exists, because it would require amalgamating traffic flows across multiple Internet service providers in different regions. Also, Internet flow is hard to count -- if you counted all traffic everywhere, you'd end up double-counting some traffic as it's routed through multiple sensors before getting to its destination, and so on.

 

Some large sites and institutions make their graphs available:

 

Wikipedia: http://wiki.wikked.net/wiki/Wikimedia_statistics/Daily

WPI: http://mrtg.wpi.edu/

[A Tripolation]

There's also Alexa. It ranks websites based on traffic and such.

[Cap'n Refsmmat]

Alexa does estimates based on the usage stats of a small sample of people using their toolbar, so it won't tell you directly the traffic to any particular site. It's also somewhat inaccurate for small sites, given the small sample size.

[rktpro]

Yes, Alexa calculates the hits through those people who have the toolbar installed. I think google should do a service like- Most visited web pages or something.

[A Tripolation]

Alexa does estimates based on the usage stats of a small sample of people using their toolbar, so it won't tell you directly the traffic to any particular site. It's also somewhat inaccurate for small sites, given the small sample size.

 

Ah. I thought it used redirects from search engines like google and yahoo.