RPM Information Network: GIS
Web Site Domain Ratings, October 1998

Site	Visits	Performance	Links In	Freshness	Pages
Lycos Maps	Top 100	Average	228,579	Excellent	66,621
Microsoft TerraServer	Top 500	No Data	3,275	No Data	44
Map Quest	Top 1,000	Slow	62,753	Excellent	18
ESRI	Top 5,000	Slow	9,135	Excellent	1,475
Autodesk: Map Guide	Top 5,000	Average	586	Excellent	278
Intergraph	Top 5,000	Average	7,798	Excellent	3,275
Map Blast (Vicinity Corp)	Top 5,000	Slow	19,983	Good	11
US Census Bureau	Top 5,000	Slow	63,596	Excellent	8,542
USGS	Top 5,000	Fast	80,720	Excellent	81,379
DeLorme Cyber Maps	Top 10,000	Average	132	Good	No Data
Bentley	Top 50,000	Slow	3,824	Excellent	2,706
MapInfo	Top 50,000	Average	2,706	Good	2,315
Sol Katz Metadata (BLM)	Top 50,000	Slow	5,876	Excellent	15,587
AGI GIS Dictionary (University Of Edinburgh)	Top 50,000	Average	5,365	Excellent	327
Roelof Oddens's Bookmarks (Utrecht University)	Top 50,000	Fast	1,008	Excellent	245
MapData Online	Top 50,000	No Data	29	No Data	53
GDT	Top 100,000	Slow	233	Excellent	52
Etak	Top 100,000	Slow	1,042	Excellent	186
AI Geostats	Top 100,000	Slow	155	No Data	290
Xerox PARC Map Server	Top 100,000	Slow	998	Excellent	39
Applied Geographic Solutions	Moderate Traffic	No Data	15	No Data	12
Big Book	Moderate Traffic	No Data	190	No Data	No Data
BLR (before GDT acquired)	Moderate Traffic	Average	16	Excellent	185
Caliper	Moderate Traffic	Average	258	Excellent	103
Claritas	Moderate Traffic	Slow	234	Good	174
GIS Linx	Moderate Traffic	Slow	293	Excellent	93
GIS World	Moderate Traffic	Slow	724	Excellent	485
Great GIS Net Sites	Moderate Traffic	Slow	631	Very Good	106
Master Environmental Library (MEL)	Moderate Traffic	Average	336	Good	516
National Decision Systems	Moderate Traffic	Slow	185	Good	75
Penn State Map Room (DCW)	Moderate Traffic	Average	210	Excellent	84
Qualitative Marketing Software	Moderate Traffic	Average	55	Very Good	90
RPM Information Network	Moderate Traffic	Slow	103	Excellent	178
Scan US	Moderate Traffic	Average	177	Very Good	419

September, 1998

Above are the ratings of some of the major GIS and mapping related websites for October, 1998. Note that we are now counting the total number of pages found on a site, rather than just those which have been accessed fairly recently and reside on caches. Thus, the page counts for some sites have dramatically increased from just a month ago, which may be more of a sign of obscured content difficult for users to "drill-down" to, rather than reflecting new content though this may also be accurate. Some of these sites, like ESRI, are map and GIS centered; others, like Lycos Maps, prominently serve maps or feature other GIS or mapping-related content. The statistics are derived using web, network and server diagnostic tools. Visits reflects how a site rates among all sites on the Web with reference to the number of unique visits. This is based on hit counts recorded from various caches on the Internet backbone. Performance refers to the average amount of time it takes to display a page, with "Fast" equating to transfer rates of 50Kbps or higher; "Average" at about the speed of a 28.8 or 33.6 dial-up modem, and "Slow" reflecting transfer speeds of a 14.4 dial-up modem or below. The speed ratings are compiled based on a periodic archival update of the Web. Links In reflects how many other sites are linking in to a domain, which reflects how valuable its resources are considered to be by peer and related sites, portals, etc. Freshness refers to how recently the site has been updated, determined by analyzing the dates of pages found during periodic web crawls, with the freshest 5% of all pages on a site evaluated to determine their average age. Pages refers to the number of pages, and is a reflection of content. Sites with a relatively small number of pages can be considered in general to be more marketing-oriented, while sites with many pages reflect a content orientation.

Also remember that in addition to the fact that some of these sites are dedicated or largely dedicated to GIS and others are not, that some sites place their mapping or GIS content on a seperate domain, and some do not. For example, Lycos leads the way only because it is such a prominent search engine and portal, and that while it appears that Autodesk has a separate domain for Map Guide, it actually references the main domain -- thus, most of the visits to Lycos or even Autodesk have nothing to do with maps or GIS. Conversely, Microsoft has a unique domain for its relatively new TerraServer, and the number of visits to this unique domain is quite impressive.

Finally, keep in mind that the designation "Moderate Traffic" is an "everybody else" designation for sites that are not among the Top 100,000 on the web in terms of unique visits.

These ratings will be updated monthly, so do come on back and see us. If you have a site you'd like us to rate, just let us know.

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