Comment by danso | Hacker News Reader

Comment by danso | Hacker News Reader

The trending/popular domains list is interesting [0]. Since Cloudflare effectively serves as part of the backbone for so many sites and services, I'm assuming their ranking is more able to count usage of sites that are mostly accessed by smartphone app, e.g. Tiktok #3, Facebook #4. Unlike Comscore [1], which seems to overly represent media sites.

Too bad Radar omits pornography sites, I was curious whether they'd actually be among the top sites. FWIW, SimilarWeb [2] (which has Tiktok at #46), does include porn sites (xvideos and pornhub are #8 and #9, respectively).

Though I don't quite understand how mozilla.org could rank as #10 on Radar's sites, just below Instagram and above Youtube, Whatsapp, and Twitter.

edit: It's also interesting to compare its Top Browser rankings with analytics.usa.gov [3]. It appears that Radar's measured users are significantly more on Chrome – 55% (desktop+mobile) vs 47.6% on usa.gov sites; whereas usa.gov users are significantly more on Safari (iOS+desktop): 35.2% vs 13% on Radar. I suppose this reflects the assumption that iOS has a bigger proportion of U.S. users than it does worldwide users.

[0] https://radar.cloudflare.com/#trending-domains

[1] https://www.comscore.com/Insights/Rankings

[2] https://www.similarweb.com/top-websites/

[3] https://analytics.usa.gov/

Some domains are up there because they're being used by applications, for exemple no one goes directly to microsoft.com but Windows does it for many things like update, monitoring, telemetry ect ...

*.mozilla.org is probably resolved when you use Firefox.

Cloudflare can't know if the resolve was made by a user or by internal application logic.

I imagine microsoft.com received quite a bit of direct traffic last Tuesday when preorders opened for the next Xbox consoles. Also, .NET Framework, .NET Core, Entity Framework, Entity Framework Core, and Azure documentation is all hosted at microsoft.com (to name just a few).

I don't mean to discredit your main point, that a lot of domain use can be credited to application or OS logic, but to say no one goes to microsoft.com is a bit weird.

Edge and IE are still a decent chunk of desktop traffic as well. And opening them with home page will probably kick off traffic to microsoft.com as well. Not sure how much that will be, but probably factors in.

Edit: Although their metrics have the browser share lower than others. They have Edge at <4% and IE doesn't register in top 10. Whereas something like https://netmarketshare.com/ has Edge at 7% and IE 5%. So there is seemingly a bias towards other browsers in their methods. Which makes sense, seems unlikely someone uses 1.1.1.1 and IE.

Edge and IE are probably loading msn.com way more than they are pulling things from microsoft.com.

You should compare usa.gov data to data on https://radar.cloudflare.com/US, in which case it would be much closer.

Btw, one piece of feedback: the interface for selecting a certain country is rather confusing. A (non-tiny) dropdown selector at the top would be much more intuitive.

I think the fact that this list has microsoft in the #2 position and mozilla at #10 casts serious doubt upon the method and conclusion.

Microsoft being high up wouldn't surprise me if it included Microsoft 365 and Outlook traffic. But I just can't imagine that surpassing Google search+Drive+GMail+Maps

(I didn't have coffee and forgot that Google is indeed the #1 domain)

Wouldn't this include all traffic? As long as it's enabled Windows and Firefox are constantly sending statistics in the background. If this is measured by # of requests, then this would make sense.

Does this mean that Firefox is sending statistics in far greater frequency than Windows? Either these stats are wrong or Firefox is sending telemetry far too frequently to rival these sites (as Firefox usage is simply not high enough otherwise).

No, it's that Windows doesn't just use *.microsoft.com for telemetry, but also Bing.com, some .ms domains, live.net, windowsupdate.com, akadns.net, and many more: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/privacy/manage-wind...

There's no chance that telemetry on the browser with 4% market share would get you anywhere near the top 10 busiest sites.

The popular domains metric is probably measured through the 1.1.1.1 dns service and firefox recently defaulted to resolving domains through cloudflares DoH service, so popular domains may be biased toward firefox users. Browser popularity is probably less biased as it would have to be measure by HTTP requests to sites using cloudflare.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com