Web traffic is a measure of a website’s or blog’s popularity. It’s probably the main criteria for choosing a site to advertise on. Problems is, unless a webmaster or blogger provides us the traffic stats, which are private and accesible only to them, we don’t really really know for sure how many visitors their sites are getting per day.

The only online tool we know of that can give us an estimate of a site’s traffic is Alexa. However, it’s not really that accurate. Some Advertising services also provide a summary of sort of sites within their system, such as ProjectWonderful but we still need to log-in. Are there any online tools we can use for a cursory view of any site’s traffic stats?

After a series of Internal Server Errors, whose causes we can’t pinpoint at present, we finally have some good news to share. We checked RMO’s latest Alexa stats today and was pleasantly surprised that it is ranked at 99,350. Finally, after months of waiting.

RMO owes this rank to our EntreCard buddies, StumbleUpon (lots of thanks to the unknown visitors who stumbled a few of RMO’s post), and Google.

Visit RMO’s Alexa Page.

Since we are on the subject of good news, here’s another one for WordPress users. Brian Gardner, of the Revolution theme series fame, has offically launched his new open source theme site, Revolution2. Themes are free and support is paid.

Hakia. Rhymes with a popular Finnish cellphone make and sound’s like a hacker’s nickname. It is presently ANOTHER search engine that might just become the OTHER search engine on its way to be THE search engine. What makes Hakia a potential David? The blog says it doesn’t rely on statistical ranking methods such as Page Rank, back links, and traffic to provide a quality search experience. Using, instead, “semantic” analysis and “meaning-based” searches to serve up useful information.

Hakia was initated in 2004 and is still in beta at the moment. No fanfare, simply an elite team lead by a nuclear scientist with specialization in artifical intelligence and fuzzy logic, an economist cum venture capitalist, and an authority on ontological semantics and computational linguistics working quitely to create what could be the search engine of the future.

Hakia has a tabbed interface, with a section reserved for “credible sites”. As we understand it, these sites are approved with some manual input from librarians. People will naturally home in on that tab when searching for information and it’s a tough section to get into (bad news for spammers, sploggers, and sites designed primarily for pay per click programs).

Hakia has also thrown down the gauntlet with a google challenge. It’s no secret what they are gunning for. WIll Hakia successfully take on Goliath?

After being jilted by a lover , is it natural to seek solace in the arms of another?   Please allow us this brief moment to be dramatic since we are going to press on to a little-known document, to Google fans anyway, that was a tedious read.

It’s no secret that Microsoft is itching to take over Google’s place with Live Search. A gargantuan ambition worthy of the software giant considering that it places a distant third in the U.S. search market behind Yahoo and Google. Data from ComScore shows that 8.3% of searchers  use Microsoft’s search engine while 63% uses Google.

Looks like Microsoft has another trick up it sleeves apart from that Yahoo take-over bid. Researchers were busy drawing up a ranking scheme that will rival that of Google’s Page Rank. However, instead of an easily gamed  system relying on incoming links, Microsoft mainly uses visitors’ browsing behavior gathered from browsers and servers. It is not yet clear though how they will implement the infamous little green pixels.

Microsoft’s method is interesting, especially the way they disclosed their algorithm. Google’s search and ranking algorithm is a secret and it has spawned a whole web industry of guesswork and gaming.

We are quoting the abstract with words in bold characters for emphasis by us below.

This paper proposes a new method for computing page importance referred to as BrowseRank. The conventional approach to compute page importance is to exploit the link graph of the web and to build a model based on that graph. For instance, PageRank is such an algorithm, which employs a discrete-time Markov process as the model. Unfortunately, the link graph might be incomplete and inaccurate with respect to data for determining page importance, because links can be easily added and deleted by web content creators.

In this paper, we propose computing page importance by using a ’user browsing graph’ created from user behavior data. In this graph, vertices represent pages and directed edges represent transitions between pages in the users’ web browsing history. Furthermore, the lengths of staying time spent on the pages by users are also included. The user browsing graph is more reliable than the link graph for inferring page importance.

This paper further proposes using the continuous-time Markov process on the user browsing graph as a model and computing the stationary probability distribution of the process as page importance. An efficient algorithm for this computation has also been devised. In this way, we can leverage hundreds of millions of users’ implicit voting on page importance. Experimental results show that BrowseRank indeed outperforms the baseline methods such as PageRank and TrustRank in several tasks.

The entire document can be downloaded here. It was released midyear of 2008.

Maybe we’re still in shock , maybe it still haven’t sunk in ,  or maybe we’re just too busy and tired to really care about it . We’re talking about the reduction of RMO’s Page Rank all the way down to zero. We’ve been assured at Google’s Page Rank discussion group that the little green pixels really don’t matter as long as RMO still appears in the SERPs for the keywords we have chosen. Okay then, those are words from experts and we take them at face value.

However, just in case we find something that indicates that somehow Google did find this little blog in error and we may need to file a request for reconsideration, we did a bit of searching for the process. We’re going to post what we found here for easy retrieval.

We need to have a gmail account, check. We need to register with Google Webmaster Tools, check. We need to claim our blog, check. We’ve done all those things before. And then we need to scoot over to the Google Webmaster Central blog where every step of the process was recently documented here. There’s even a Youtube video of a hot chick and a weird guy to explain things, which we will try to embed in this post (we’ll try it some other time since videos still do weird things to our post layouts here).