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

Site	Visits	Performance	Links In	Freshness	Pages
Microsoft TerraServer	Top 500	Average	666	Excellent	40
Map Quest	Top 1,000	Slow	58,087	Excellent	10
Map Blast (Vicinity Corp)	Top 5,000	Slow	16,908	N/A	N/A
USGS	Top 5,000	Fast	43,264	Excellent	2,436
Bentley	Top 50,000	Slow	4,032	Excellent	2,723
MapInfo	Top 50,000	Average	2,319	N/A	N/A
MicroImages (TNT Products)	Top 50,000	Average	703	Excellent	811
Sol Katz Metadata (BLM)	Top 50,000	Slow	454	Excellent	N/A
AGI GIS Dictionary (University Of Edinburgh)	Top 50,000	Average	5,049	Excellent	173
Lycos Maps	Top 100,000	Average	12,892	Excellent	N/A
MapData Online	Top 100,000	N/A	25	N/A	52
GDT	Top 100,000	Slow	179	Excellent	52
Etak	Top 100,000	Slow	991	Very Good	101
AI Geostats	Top 100,000	Slow	155	No Data	290
DeLorme Cyber Maps	Top 100,000	Average	132	N/A	N/A
US Census Bureau	Top 100,000	Average	58,043	Excellent	755
Xerox PARC Map Server	Top 100,000	Slow	998	Excellent	39
Applied Geographic Solutions	Moderate Traffic	No Data	15	No Data	12
Autodesk: Map Guide	Moderate Traffic	Average	667	Excellent	284
Big Book	Moderate Traffic	No Data	190	No Data	No Data
BLR (before GDT acquired)	Moderate Traffic	Fast	16	Excellent	185
Roelof Oddens's Bookmarks (Utrecht University)	Moderate Traffic	Average	855	Excellent	N/A
Caliper	Moderate Traffic	Average	187	Excellent	99
Claritas	Moderate Traffic	Slow	212	Good	94
ESRI	Moderate Traffic	Slow	6,557	Excellent	526
Intergraph	Moderate Traffic	Average	7,620	Excellent	1,747
GIS Linx	Moderate Traffic	Slow	337	Excellent	77
GIS World	Moderate Traffic	Slow	658	Excellent	15
Great GIS Net Sites	Moderate Traffic	Slow	771	Excellent	116
Master Environmental Library (MEL)	Moderate Traffic	Average	336	Good	516
National Decision Systems	Moderate Traffic	Average	140	Very Good	73
Penn State Map Room (DCW)	Moderate Traffic	Average	210	Excellent	84
Qualitative Marketing Software	Moderate Traffic	Average	55	Very Good	89
RPM Information Network	Moderate Traffic	Slow	139	Excellent	195
Scan US	Moderate Traffic	Average	162	Very Good	108

September, 1998
October, 1998

Above are the ratings of some of the major GIS and mapping related websites for November, 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 September, 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. Yet another consideration is that the most popular sites may indeed be less popular than they look, because the cache-count methodology tends to overstate these. 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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