New reports show the usage of technologies by top sites

Posted by Sam Soltano on 21 October 2010 in News

Obviously, high traffic sites have different needs than average sites. Technologies that are well suited specifically for high traffic sites are rarely amongst the most popular ones. The new reports are based on a logarithmic scoring scheme, where technologies get a higher score when the average traffic rank of the sites that are using it, is low. You may think of the best scoring technologies as the most "up-market" ones, although, the difference is not always related to a price. It's simply that webmasters of high traffic sites prefer these technologies, whereas webmasters of average sites prefer other technologies, for whatever reason.

You can find the new reports in the breakdown menu of the technology overview reports (e.g. content management systems), labeled as "Top Site Usage".

You will find quite a few surprises when looking at the top scoring technologies. The current leaders in various categories are:

• CoreMedia    in content management systems
• Java     in server-side programming languages
• Javascript     in client-side programming languages
• MochiKit    in JavaScript libraries
• XHTML    in markup languages
• AOLserver    in web servers
• Mac OS    in operating systems
• Gomez    in traffic analysis tools
• Adperium    in advertising networks

Please note that we don't calculate these scores for every category. For instance, we find it not useful for content languages, such as English or French. Webmasters are unlikely to choose the language based on such a scoring, and we don't want to get involved into a silly "my language is more up-market than yours" discussion.

We find it interesting to compare the new top site usage reports with ranking breakdown reports. If we take as an example the server-side programming language category, we see that PHP is used by 75% of the sites, while Java has a much higher top site usage score. Now, which language is actually used more by top sites in absolute figures? One can see this in the ranking brakdown report: Amongst the top 1.000 sites, PHP is used by 59% and Java is used by 27%. That is still a gap, but much narrower than amongst the top 1 million sites.

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Please note, that all trends and figures mentioned in that article are valid at the time of writing. Our surveys are updated frequently, and these trends and figures are likely to change over time.

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