6 ms·
Ask HN: How many HN members are there?
- d0ne 15y agoIf Googlebot is doing its job then there are around 28,700 registered users on Hacker News.
- cryptoz 15y agoIf someone creates an account but never posts, will there ever be a public-facing link the the userid page? If not, then Googlebot could be doing its job perfectly but have a totally inaccurate number of registered users using this method. I'm curious what the actual number is now...
- ComputerGuru 15y agoYes, somehow. See this: http://www.google.com/#sclient=psy&hl=en&source=hp&q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com%20inurl%3A%22user%3Fid%3D%22%20karma%3A%20%200&pbx=1&oq=&aq=&aqi=&aql=&gs_sm=&gs_upl=&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.&fp=1a5f98edd9bbd4cd&biw=1222&bih=683&pf=p&pdl=3000 http://www.google.com/#sclient=psy&hl=en&source=hp&#...
- robertk 15y agoAll of those people have posted comments. That's how. If you have never posted a comment or submitted a link, yet have an account, Google won't find you/
- jaredmck 15y agothe result counts shown on google are not accurate, however.
- lojack 15y agoAn accurate count is a documented non-feature of Google.
- joejohnson 15y agoWhy are there so many usernames that are perscription drugs? On the first page I see Zithromax, Zoloft, Zyprexa and Abilify.
- pavel_lishin 15y agoProbably spam-bots auto-filling forms.
- kylec 15y agoIt appears that most/all were created 1070 days ago and have 1 karma. I suspect that it was probably an attempt to rig the voting of a post.
- a5seo 15y agoThese pages rank at the top of the site: search because they have a lot of backlinks. Why? Because someone created the profile, then went out and created links to their profile page (e.g. http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?site=http%3A%2F%2Fnews.ycombinator.com%2Fuser%3Fid%3Dzithromax http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?site=http%3A%2F%2Fnews...). Why? Because they were probably planning to drop a link on their HN profile page to a page that sells Zithromax. This is a common strategy on Youtube or really any social site that gives you a profile page and the ability to drop a followed link. Even if you're building junky links to your HN profile page, the overall domain authority and trust of HN is relatively high, so it's a way to launder link juice and create a quality link to whatever it is you're selling. Eric Ward wrote about it here: http://searchengineland.com/social-link-manipulation-11429 http://searchengineland.com/social-link-manipulation-11429 There's a fairly good sized contingent of the affiliate marketing world that depends on this link building strategy.
- joejohnson 15y agoOh wow. Thank you for that explanation. It's impressive how many of these profiles were made. This means the total number of real HN accounts is probably significantly less than 28k.
- 15y ago
- vaporstun 15y agoI'd be interested to see some analytics, such as how many users are there with 100+ karma because that's likely a better measure of the number of active users than the number of registered users (many of which are likely inactive). However, that doesn't account for lurkers. Or, the number of users that have logged in within the past week though this is probably something pg would have to give us because I can't think of any way to determine that without the backend data.
- d0ne 15y agoRough Estimate of users with Karma > 100: http://www.google.com/search?sclient=psy&hl=en&biw=1600&bih=755&noj=1&source=hp&q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+inurl%3A%22user%3Fid%3D%22+100...100000 http://www.google.com/search?sclient=psy&hl=en&biw=1...
- Spyro7 15y agoI have to say that I did not know about the inurl google search parameter. However, this is indeed a very rough estimate because the parameter 100...100000 also captures the number that indicates how long ago a user account was created, so it would also count accounts that were created a while ago (over 100 days) but were inactive.
- AgentConundrum 15y agoI knew about the inurl parameter; it's the range operator that's new to me.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- shawnee_ 15y ago.. also works; this is the first I've seen of ... for a numerical range find, which is VERY useful for date searches. A couple years ago, I gave a lesson to a class of mostly senior citizens for how to use Google to do genealogy work. We covered the range find, the inurl: and a couple other obscure but useful search enhancers. Pretty interesting stuff (here's the ODP, if interested) http://www.zentu.net/fmt/searchpresentation.odp http://www.zentu.net/fmt/searchpresentation.odp
- BlackJack 15y agoLet's start a count. +1
- smiler 15y agoWouldn't it just be easier to ask pg to post the data... pg?
- spxdcz 15y agoMany of the results are 'No such user'. Add 'karma' to the end of the query to get a more accurate guess: around 11,600
- kmanlives 15y agoMy account page exists, but I rarely post (4 comments); adding my username to the google search finds zero results, so there are at least 28,701, and likely many more than that. My intuition is that there are many people that don't post at all or only post infrequently.
- nosequel 15y agoI also mess up the numbers. HN has so many ridiculous ways to log in, that I forgot a couple of times how I logged in (native, google, open auth, etc.) so I've created four or so accounts now. If I add them up I'm > 100, but no single user has 100 karma.
- JacobAldridge 15y agoFor comparison, pg posted figures on Feb 9 showing 90,000 unique visitors (timeframe unclear to me, but I'm guessing daily) - http://ycombinator.com/images/hntraffic-9feb11.png http://ycombinator.com/images/hntraffic-9feb11.png If (as the results of my Google search revealed) there are 28,600 members, then 90,000 uniques is roughly a 2:1 lurker ratio (almost certainly much higher, given member!=active member, and not all members visit every day)
- kgermino 15y agoTrue, but don't forget that number of uniques is not the same as number of users, especially if you aren't logged in. For example: In any given month I visit HN from a laptop, desktop, and work computer using both Chrome and Firefox, in and out of incognito mode, as well as from two different browsers on my iPad and often from other people's computers. Obviously I am not always logged in to all of these browsers so depending on how pg counted uniques (my understanding is that cookies are the common practice though I could be totally off base on this) I could be counted as anywhere from 3 to 15 uniques a month.
- adulau 15y agoIt would be really nice to have dataset available for researchers with username, their posts and their comments. As an example, we could use the "SPEAR Algorithm"[1] to find expertise in specific domains per HN user. [1] http://www.michael-noll.com/projects/spear-algorithm/ http://www.michael-noll.com/projects/spear-algorithm/
- d0ne 15y agoIf pg wouldn't mind me scraping the site, in a manner that would not impact the sites performance, I will write an app to collect this data and publish it to the public domain.
- yahelc 15y agoCan't speak for pg, but you should probably follow the site's robots.txt file's rules: http://news.ycombinator.com/robots.txt http://news.ycombinator.com/robots.txt It sets a crawl-delay of 30 seconds.
- FaceKicker 15y agowget does this automatically, in case grandparent doesn't know. I'm not going to try it (because I'm not going to analyze the results myself, so it would be wasteful), but I think "wget -r news.ycombinator.com" would take care of this... It will not visit external links without the --span-hosts parameter (I believe).
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- __rkaup__ 15y agoHow come that comes up with a Content-Type: text/html header?
- bootload 15y ago"... If pg wouldn't mind me scraping the site, in a manner that would not impact the sites performance ..." you don't have to scape the site, RTFM. The official 'hnsearch' api will most likely yield the info you need ~ http://www.hnsearch.com/api http://www.hnsearch.com/api
- kno 15y agoTake a look at Page 10 of search results : http://www.google.com/#q=site:news.ycombinator.com+inurl:%22user%3Fid%3D%22&hl=en&prmd=ivnsfd&ei=BTowTqaWNMrZgQeJjbHmCg&start=90&sa=N&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.&fp=5c3a26213071fb76&biw=1280&bih=605 http://www.google.com/#q=site:news.ycombinator.com+inurl:%22...
- eric-hu 15y agoFor those too lazy to click the link: all search results show "no such user"
- katieben 15y agoI like the guy whose name is user-id (:
- uid 15y agowe are not related
- koenigdavidmj 15y agoGo back to Reddit.
- die_sekte 15y agoThe last big poll (the one about hiding comment scores) had about ~4500 votes, IIRC. Everybody who voted is probably somewhat active on here; and I'd guess that most active users voted.
- mcarrano 15y agoI would say at best this gives a rough estimate of the amount of users. I tried searching my own username and it does not appear in the results. Perhaps I just failed at using Google?
- jannes 15y agoThis doesn't account for users who have never submitted or commented, because there would be no way for their profile URLs to end up in Google's index. Or am I missing something? I know that there's the possibility for things to get into the index through the Google Toolbar, but I suspect that the fraction of HN users who use the Google Toolbar is quite low.
- msb 15y agoOr rarely submit or comment. I am logged in and on HN everyday, but do not show up. Maybe with this comment I will.
- niels_olson 15y agoInteresting. So, only 522 with over 2000 karma?
- Yxven 15y agoOn a related note, how much of a slashdoting can you expect for posting a link here? There aren't as many registered users as I expected, but it doesn't account for lurkers. When my niche website is finished, I'd like to share it with the hacker news crowd, but it's not built to scale to a bajillion users.
- powertower 15y agoThat's only users crawled, which is the amount of users that have made at least 1 comment or 1 post -- as there are no user list pages here.
- fenesiistvan 15y agoa small improvement: site:news.ycombinator.com inurl:"user?id=" -"No such user"
- suyash 15y agoGoogle was showing 27,200 results so if they are all valid user id's without repetitions, I would assume around 27,200 registered users but that seems pretty low, doesn't it?
- aaronwall 15y agoBased on the referrals the site sends (often 4,000+) I would have thought it was much higher than that. My guess is that there are a lot of lurkers & only something like 2% of site visitors even create an account.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- tikna 15y agoAs of 31st May, 2011 there were 67248 HN Users. Source: http://hnarchive.in http://hnarchive.in