6 ms·
Stack Overflow just became a top-500 site.
- pierrefar 16y agoIs this directly due to them being featured on MSDN?
- yatsyk 16y agoIt seems that they have stable growth and there is no big increase in traffic last time. So it looks unrelated.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- jacquesm 16y agoAlexa has had them in the top 500 for a while: http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/stackoverflow.com http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/stackoverflow.com That's very impressive, I think that stackoverflow will see a major boost from google groups shutting down too.
- JeremyBanks 16y agoGoogle Group isn't shutting down. They're turning off files and pages, that's all.
- jacquesm 16y agoright: http://groups-announcements.blogspot.com/2010/09/notice-about-pages-and-files.html http://groups-announcements.blogspot.com/2010/09/notice-abou...
- jarin 16y agoI guess that settles the debate about whether choice of language matters or not :) Although I can't imagine scaling has been fun (or cheap).
- tommi 16y agoJeff wrote about PHP, the language does not matter: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2008/05/php-sucks-but-it-doesnt-matter.html http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2008/05/php-sucks-but-it-do... I've never seen language choice as a big deal. It's just a tool among many others to get a product done.
- thomasz 16y agoFrom what I've read on their blog they seem to get along fine with a moderately expensive SQL server and some chap application servers hosted in a data center. No fancy NOSQL stuff or cloud instances involved.
- spolsky 16y agoScaling has been cheap, and fun. Read about our newest data center: http://blog.serverfault.com/post/1432571770/stack-overflows-new-york-data-center http://blog.serverfault.com/post/1432571770/stack-overflows-... Read about our SQL Server hardware: http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/10/database-upgrade/ http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/10/database-upgrade/
- carson 16y agoAre you factoring in the SQL Server licenses when you say it is cheap?
- ergo98 16y agoPerhaps they're taking advantage of BizSpark or WebSpark or a similar programs. If they aren't, the dual CPU machine they mention would require $14,000 of SQL Server licenses (if you paid list). EDIT: Actually there's a newer "Web Edition" targeted to roles like this that halves the price. So $7,000 for that server (the details are sparse, but it also sounds like you can opt into it for $15 / month / processor). That's a lot to someone trying to shoehorn a startup, but is it really a lot for real businesses? On the server end they still have tremendous headroom in the scaling up department...and that's before the Westmere-EX drops and bumps the top up quite a significant amount. You can add 1TB of memory, and four 8-core processors, to commodity Dell servers. That's before you get into the serious business.
- nhebb 16y agoI've never looked at quantcast stats before. How accurate are their estimates of age, income, kids? I ask because it says that 23% of Stack Overflow's visitors are female, and that doesn't seem very accurate. NB: This is based solely on my recollection posters' avatars, which may be a bad measure, but it's the only one I've got.
- ceejayoz 16y agoIn my experience, women on the internet tend to be less likely to indicate that in their profiles/avatars.
- duffbeer703 16y agoAbout a third of IT staff at my employer are female. That seems reasonable to me.
- randlet 16y agoIt's almost hard to believe we went so long without a site like StackOverflow. Not surprising they've grown so fast considering how much better they are than everyone else. Congrats & thank you to Jeff & Joel & the rest of the SO team. You guys truly make the Internet a better place for all programmers!
- gaius 16y agoYet ExpertSexChange is still near the top of Google search results - 'tis a mystery. Still, it validates the SEO business model that gaming the algorithm can get you higher ranked than real actual content of the kind SO has in buckets.
- MortenK 16y agoExperts exchange has been in business since at least 2001, they also have a bit actual content.
- jacobbijani 16y agoI think you can still just read Google's cached version for those results. The actual content is below the placeholder content.
- cdmckay 16y agoUgh, I wish people would stop thinking it's clever to call Experts Exchange "ExpertSexChange". First, it's not clever, and second, it implies that there's something wrong with a sex change.
- jrockway 16y agoAh yes, dismissive argument format #2837: "I hate when people say $foo. It's like $politically_incorrect_thing." The problem is that calling "experts exchange" "expert sex change" does not say anything about the validity of a sex change operation. It's saying that it's a dumb name for a programming Q&A site. This makes it equivalent to saying, "I hate ExpertsExchange. Look at how dumb the name is."
- edanm 16y agoI wonder what the numbers are for all the new sites, and whether they're started gaining serious traction outside of the SO regulars.
- jasonkester 16y agoThink about the demographics of people who seek out and install the Quantcast/Compete/Alexa toolbar. Now look at the demographics of their respective Top N lists. Now imagine a knitting community site that gets twice the traffic of StackOverflow. Would it appear in the Quantcast/Compete/Alexa Top 500?
- chrismiller 16y agoStackOverflow is a Quantcast Quantified site. This means it's traffic is directly measured with a tracking pixel on each of Stackoverflow's pages.
- 0-4 16y agoI think the OP's point is that there's likely hundreds/thousands of sites that aren't directly 'quantified', but get more traffic. Saying 'it's a top 500 site' is only meaningful if all websites in the world are quantified which they aren't. The absolute stats for quantified sites are good and accurate, but when you start saying 'top 500 website' you're on very shaky ground.
- chaosmachine 16y agoThe problem is: Are all 499 sites above them measured the same way? And all the ones below? The answer is no, of course. Most sites don't run the QC tracking pixel. That makes any ranking they give fairly questionable, in my mind.
- citricsquid 16y agocase in point, we (http://minecraftforum.net http://minecraftforum.net & http://minecraftwiki.net http://minecraftwiki.net) have 60m page views per month (as Stackoverflow does -- according to Joel) and we're nowhere near the top 500 according to QC.
- df07 16y agoThe ranking is based on visitors, not page views. Based on the graphs posted a few weeks ago at http://imgur.com/a/haHHz http://imgur.com/a/haHHz, it looks like you have about 2.8 million unique visitors per month to SO's 8.6 million in Quantcast
- AlexC04 16y agoI really love SO. The thing that really got me started using it was the article I read (on here) about a guy who got headhunted for a job interview at Google off the back of his stack overflow score. I thought - holy geez, I'd better get working then! I've not actually been to quantcast before but it seems an interesting site. I usually grab my rankings data from Compete and Alexa Top 300 sites worldwide and US in Alexa http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/stackoverflow.com# http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/stackoverflow.com# Top 11,000 in Compete (maybe it's a bit better if you have their PRO ranking) http://siteanalytics.compete.com/stackoverflow.com/ http://siteanalytics.compete.com/stackoverflow.com/ Actually... Quantcast looks like it might be fundamentally different from Alexa and Compete. I wonder how much it costs? Maybe I could use that to find my audience. One thing I found interestedin on quantcast the location dropdown and see how the site ranks in other countries. Out of interest, I pulled Canada and saw that we've got Stack ranked as 105 instead of 500 ... which must mean we're 5 times "techie-er" than the States. BOO YAH! Then I switched to pulling the other dropdowns and realized we're both getting our butts handed to us by the UK, Germany and India. Probably just means all their OTHER sites suck eggs. :)
- archgrove 16y agoIt would be interesting to find out how many users they're getting from their semi recently launched API (http://stackapps.com http://stackapps.com). I know my iPhone Stack Exchange client http://sixtoeightapp.com http://sixtoeightapp.com has over a thousand downloads, and won't be counted by Quantcast. Whilst it's more of a complementary access point, other apps on Stack Apps might suffice as the sole access point for passive users (i.e. those who just want answers, as the API is read only currently).
- jamespo 16y agoNice one, checking your app out now...
- gaius 16y agoOfftopic - how on Earth did Apple give you a 12+ rating for an app about programming questions!? Another mystery.
- archgrove 16y agoI chose it. Any app that downloads data from the web needs to be careful with age ratings - Stack Exchange has more than programming questions - it has, e.g. video games, with perhaps more age restricted material. I chose 12+ as a compromise between Apple's desire to have age approprate labelling, and restricting likely users.
- ludwig 16y agoNice app! Any plans for an iPad version?
- archgrove 16y agoYup! Not sure exactly when, but certainly on the radar.
- theDoug 16y agoIn under two years, no less! It shows what dedication, attention to the big details, and a clear _goal_ can get you. "So long hyphen site."
- cletus 16y agoStackoverflow is an excellent medium for asking programming questions. The thing I question is their VC-backed strategy to apply that to many other fields. Sure it's early days yet but even the original "trilogy" sites haven't come anywhere near SO's success. I have this nasty feeling that SO won't be able to justify that investment and thus turn from a successful small business to a failed venture. On the plus side only one USV portfolio company (I forget the name) has ever switched off the lights.