I received some great feedback from my first blog on Most Searched Web Sites. Acording to Alexa, a web information company (www.alexa.com), they offered a list of the Top 100, which I have posted 20 of them below.
Top 20 most searched web sites in the U.S. according to Alexa.
1) Google.com
2) Yahoo.com
3) YouTube.com
4) Myspace.com
5) Facebook.com
6) Windows live - live.com
7) Microsoft Netwok - msn.com
8) Wikipedia.com
9) EBay.com
10) Craigslist.com
11) AOL.com
12) Blogger.com
13) Amazon.com
14) Go.com
15) cnn.com
16) microsoft.com
17) photobucket.com
18) flickr.com
19) comcast.net
20) Internet Movie Database - imdb.com
Here is what I can tell you about Alexa.
They were founded in 1996. They have developed an installed base of millions of toolbars as was suggested in the feedback from my last blog. They are one of the largest Web crawls.
A few comments on the last blog questioned the accuracy of the data. I'm not sure any data will ever be without question as data is subjective and can be manipulated. I have been unable to identify the competitors to Alexa for comparison.
I came across www.MarketingCharts.com They run stats on all kinds of stuff offering a feature to have stats emailed daily to follow trends and web sites.
They listed the Top 10 Real Estate web sites in January 2009.
Here is details from their site about the data
"Note: The Hitwisedata featured is based on US market share of visits as defined by the IAB, which is the percentage of online traffic to the domain or category, from the Hitwise sample of 10 million US internet users. Hitwise measures more than 1 million unique websites on a daily basis, including sub-domains of larger websites. Hitwise categorizes websites into industries on the basis of subject matter and content, as well as market orientation and competitive context. The market share of visits percentage does not include traffic for all sub-domains of certain websites that could be reported on separately."
I was also looking at found PC Magazine that looked at the Top 100 Sites in 2008. It was not quite as helpful, but here is a link if you are curious http://www.pcmag.com/category2/0,2806,7488,00.asp
There are a lot of ways to gather data, so if anyone has suggestions of a company or list of Top Web sites other than Alexa, please share.