Alexa ranks every site on the net for volume of traffic, essentially a ranking of popularity. CR is apparently the 1134632 most popular site on the Internets. Huzzah for my one visitor!

As a comparison BoingBoing.net is 4259 on the list.

slashdot.org is 801
wired.com is 409
news.bbc.co.uk is 22
google.com is 3
Sadly, and with deep depression, the top site — by volume — on the web is yahoo.com

Why? I have no clue, I’ve not been to yahoo.com for about seven years, maybe much more. So, my dearest and fluffy readers, in the interests of you and you alone I have loaded yahoo.com. This means you don’t have to. What do I see?

The first thing I notice is the red banner, Yahoo!, infantile and mind assaulting. Then I notice the banner ad below and the shopping advert to the right. Why? These two elements are the only bright blocks of colour on the page. The other elements are pale blue or pale purple.

I can’t see content immediately, there are a million links to other Yahoo pages and the only content I can see is an ‘In the News’ box, a pale purple below the advert on the right.

And that’s it. Am I missing something here? Yahoo.com has no content. Ah yes, it’s a portal, that’s the point of Yahoo, however it looks to me like a self reverential portal, I hope that it’s spinning around in an ever tightening arc and will one day consume itself.

Going to Yahoo just makes me angry, sad and bored — it is vacuous and devoid of anything worth thinking about or spending time on. Which, little old cynical me thinks, might explain why it is number one.

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