Scott Yang's Playground » alexa http://scott.yang.id.au Faith, Technology and Randomness in Life, According to Scott Thu, 09 Feb 2012 09:01:12 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 Top 500 Sites in Australia According to Alexa http://scott.yang.id.au/2009/05/top-500-sites-in-australia-according-to-alexa/ http://scott.yang.id.au/2009/05/top-500-sites-in-australia-according-to-alexa/#comments Fri, 29 May 2009 04:10:08 +0000 scotty http://scott.yang.id.au/2009/05/top-500-sites-in-australia-according-to-alexa/ Need to analyse a list of top sites in Australia, and the following Python scripts helped me to get the site name + domain name off from Alexa with minimum effort:

#!/usr/bin/env python
import re, urllib
r = r'<a  href="/siteinfo/(.*?)"  ><strong>(.*?)</strong>';
for i in range(25):
    u = 'http://www.alexa.com/topsites/countries;%d/AU' % i
    for x, m in enumerate(re.findall(r, urllib.urlopen(u).read())):
        print '%d. %s (%s)' % (x + 1 + i * 20, m[1], m[0].strip())

YMMV. Considering how Alexa has been trying to obfuscate their HTML pages to prevent scrapping, I won’t be surprised that this script stops to work tomorrow…

]]> http://scott.yang.id.au/2009/05/top-500-sites-in-australia-according-to-alexa/feed/ 4 Alexa Updates Its Ranking System http://scott.yang.id.au/2008/04/alexa-updates-its-ranking-system/ http://scott.yang.id.au/2008/04/alexa-updates-its-ranking-system/#comments Thu, 17 Apr 2008 02:27:54 +0000 scotty http://scott.yang.id.au/2008/04/alexa-updates-its-ranking-system/ TechCrunch: Alexa overhauls ranking system where it now uses multiple sources rather than just their toolbar data. I actually noticed the change in Alexa ranking before I spotted the post at TC. Good move I think, at least Alexa is now in the position of competing with Compete and Quantcast, which are almost useless for sites outside the centre of universe United States. OzBargain has jumped from 90,000+ to 49,000+ on Alexa — but still shows insufficient data on Compete and Quantcast.

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