[plug] lies, damned lies and statistics. (OT)

[Bradley Woodward]

At 11:24 AM 18/09/2000, you wrote:
>What are you talking about?  The page says:
>   Apache loses 6,205,474 sites, causing its share to drop around three
>   percentage points from 62.53% to 59.56%.
>
>The graph shows the changes between sites and normal sites.  That's what
>the numbers say.  Am I reading something wrong?

No, you're not.  Those are the exact counts of web sites recorded, and 
quite accurate.  There are a NEW set of figures though.  (is it just me or 
is this sounding like a bad gangster movie with the crooked accountant 
running two sets of books)

Ok then.  This is the story as I see it writen on the Netcraft webpage at 
http://www.netcraft.com/survey/index-200007.html#active.

Really, it requires reading from about the half way mark.  Look for the 
heading  "How many active sites are there?".  They have an arguement that 
says a large number of all web sites are "non active", and therefore should 
not be included in the final analysis.  It also takes into account virtual 
web sites.  Quite honestly, I'm a tad confused as to how they come by the 
numbers.  What I believe they're doing is taking out stuff like the default 
web pages some domain registration sites create.  For example, register.com 
runs linux servers, but has hundreds of thousands of web sites that are 
just their default "Welcome to foo.com.  This is a default web page, 
because the owner is too lazy to change it."  If you don't count those 
non-active sites, linux/apache loses 1.3 million sites.  Or so Netcraft says.

Quote from Netcraft:  "So, whereas in the early days of the web, hostnames 
were a good indication of actively managed content providing information 
and services to the internet community, the situation now is considerably 
more blurred, with the web including a great deal of activity, but also 
some considerable quantity of sites untouched by human hand, produced 
automatically at the point of customer acquisition by domain registration 
or hosting service companies. "

The whole thing is that Netcraft are no longer counting these automatic web 
pages, and with that done you end up with the set of numbers that says 
Apache is only a few % ahead of MS.

<puff puff>

But even with all this playing of games with the numbers, Apache still wins 
out.

Oddly enough, if you survey just the Fortune 500 companies, most are 
running Netscape servers.  Who'd have guessed.



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