Alexa comparison of traffic at house.gov, senate.gov, and whitehouse.gov over the past month *

Beyond Googling

If you want to wander the net there's some tools beyond search engines. For website rankings, there's Alexa. There are concerns over how representative their opt-in user base is, but for casual surfing it's fine. You can view the Top 20, Global 500; and view top sites by country, language, or subject. You can also compare traffic at sites you select over various time intervals. Nowadays Alexa is a search engine and an Open Directory-based web directory. While Yahoo is the most popular of the surviving web directories of old, the Open Directory Project is the largest. For the "deep web" there's also Gary Price's librarian oriented List of Lists and ResourceShelf. If you want to really dabble there are search voyeurs, sites that let you see what other people are searching for. Larkfarm has a nice set of voyeur and random links.

* The spike in traffic at senate.gov in mid-May was either the authorization of the use of the Capitol grounds for the Greater Washington Soap Box Derby, or maybe the Immigration Bill.

Alexa

The Open Directory Project

List of Lists

ResourceShelf

Search Voyeurs