The 300,000 Biggest Websites, Visualised With Their Icons

How do the 288,945 biggest websites on the web stack up against each other? Take a very close look at this chart to find out.

While you could spend all day with a microscope trying to sort out the layers lurking behind AOL and IMDb, the preferred method is to check out Nmap’s interactive version. As for the method behind the radness:

The area of each icon is proportional to the sum of the reach of all sites using that icon. When both a bare domain name and its “www.” counterpart used the same icon, only one of them was counted. The smallest icons—those corresponding to sites with approximately 0.0001% reach—are scaled to 16×16 pixels. The largest icon (Google) is 11,936 x 11,936 pixels, and the whole diagram is 37,440 x 37,440.

Which is, uh, huge.

Happy hunting! And please remember take a moment of appreciation for LiveJournal hanging tough. [Nmap via The Daily What]