CLIP: Dataopedia: Quick Snapshot of Quantitative and Qualitative Site Metrics

If you're in the practice of researching sites - trying to get a better idea of Web traffic or metrics - you've likely developed a workflow for gathering your information. Start with whois, jump to Compete, head over to Alexa, check Quantcast, search on Google, search on Twitter, and so on and so on. Even with a saved set of tabs or a handy bookmarklet, you're jumping all over the place.

Now, you can get at all of that information with one simple search at Dataopedia, a metasearch engine for Web site data.

Dataopedia hits all of the high points for Web metrics. Searching for a particular URL provides you with rankings from Google Page Rank, Alexa, Compete, and Quantcast, four of the primary sources I check on a regular basis. It also provides whois information, one of those most basic resources that always contains nuggets of interesting information.

But the service goes beyond those traditional lookups to provide more details on the site and its offerings, serving up a few extra data points that round out the the typical traffic and visitor information. Dataopedia also searches YouTube and Flickr for multimedia associated with the site. It looks at social news networks like Delicious, Reddit, and Digg to help provide insight into the site's popularity. And it checks Technorati, Google News, and Twitter for other mentions of the site.

There's also something interesting buried at the bottom of the site profiles: an ability to comment on the site using Disqus. While that's not likely to have the reach of a Google Search Wiki, it provides yet another way to gather details about the site and its reputation.

Dataopedia does a nice job of gathering quantitative and qualitative site metrics in a single spot. And its tab structure makes the information easy to consume. I'm planning to use it on a regular basis to get more details about the sites I'm planning to cover, because you never know what it might reveal.

To try it, visit Dataopedia and enter a URL into the search box.

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KillerStartups Launches Dataopedia, A One-Stop Shop For Information About Websites

by Robin Wauters on December 19, 2008

KillerStartups, or rather its overarching company Startups.com Networks, has been in the news lately. First, they picked up Startups.com in a killer deal, next thing you know they’re launching their own web applications (Twingr). Now, they’re introducing the strangely named but quite usefulDataopedia, which is meant to serve as an information resource for websites.

It’s actually very useful, even if the idea isn’t exactly new (Quarkbase, for example, is verysimilar if not exactly alike). Just as you would use our own Crunchbase for information about companies, Dataopedia gives you a run-down of all the data it can find about a website you provide an URL for (including Crunchbase data, in fact). The web service aggregates data from dozens of sources in combination with a number of public APIs.

It’s valuable to have all this information in one place, and it’s plenty: expect data about traffic (arguably from the poorest source available, Alexa, although there are embedded graphs from Compete and Quantcast too), screenshots, names of people involved, WHOIS information, Google PageRank, multimedia links and embeds, jobs, office locations, and so on.

The web service comes with a nice set of features that make it easy for you to fetch data the way you choose. Send a website URL to a custom e-mail address and you’ll receive a reply in HTML format with all the information about that website. Browsing on a smartphone? Dataopedia has mobile versions that can be consulted with most devices. Firefox user? Get the bookmarklet, add a custom searchbox or install the add-on (coming soon). And my personal favorite: send a Twitter message to @dataopedia with a URL and you’ll get a tweet back with a link to the appropriate Dataopedia entry.