collects a wide variety of internet related data and lists descriptive statistics based upon that data. In particular, they collect data on the top Internet sites during every month. They base the popularity of the sites not on the amount of hits, but the number of unique visitors. That basically means how many people use the site. If a given computer hits the site a bunch of times, they are still count as one person. I think it would be quite difficult to get accurate counts of this, but it does provide an alternative to merely counting the number of hits. Anyway, the following 10 logos were collected from the top 10 sites they had listed for the month of July 200.

Coming in first is but that is really no surprise since they were basically the first major search engine on the web. Sites like Yahoo have gotten so large and comprehensive that they are now called Internet Portals. comes in second. That's no surprise since they are the largest dial-up service provider in the world. The next three, in rank from left to right,surprised me a bit, but given that Microsoft has gotten into the game of providing online dial-up service, it is less surprising. By the way, what the heck is passport.com? I was confounded when I saw that came in number 5.

Next comes which is a free online web page hosting service. They give you 15 Megs of space and even have web page wizards that will help you build a simple page. The bad news is that you have to include avertising for them into your page. But I guess that's not so bad for a free web account. The fact that they are teamed up with Yahoo no doubt contributes to the fact that they came in number 6. Coming in at 7 and 8 in order from left to right are Lycos and Alta Vista, which are Internet portals. Like Yahoo, they grew out of standard search engines and have become behemoth sites which carry information about everything you can think of -- and more. Finally, we get to some e-tailers. First comes which is the an internet auction site. If you can't find someone selling it there, it probably doesn't exist. Last but not least is --probably the first e-store to make real headlines. They're actually supposed to turn a profit in 2001 or 2002!