Competitive research and traffic analysis is an important part of launching a new site or web app.
I did a quick study that uses source code search sites as the subject for comparison. Here I highlight some key metrics from these two Firefox add-ons:
I found these sites through my delicious bookmarks, search, and the "Similar Pages" and "Related Links" features of both of the above add-ons
| Source Code Search Site | Alexa Traffic Rank | CoolGoogle PageRanke |
|---|---|---|
| Google.com/codesearch | 2 | 7 |
| Koders.com | 34642 | 6 |
| Krugle.com | 113268 | 5 |
| Codefetch.com | 175389 | 4 |
| Codease.com | 179759 | 4 |
First, you have to take these rankings with a grain of salt. Google's PageRank seems to honor the difference between google.com (10) and google.com/codesearch (7). Alexa's Traffic Rank (2) does not honor the difference and uses the ranking for Google's main domain instead.
Another useful metric is unique visitors seen here from compete.com: http://siteanalytics.compete.com/koders.com+krugle.com+codease.com/?metric=uv
For a quick look at how the search results look for these sites, I plugged in Spring's verbosely named AbstractTransactionalDataSourceSpringContextTests. Here are some links to the results:
- http://www.google.com/codesearch?q=AbstractTransactionalDataSourceSpringContextTests&hl=en&btnG=Search+Code
- http://www.koders.com/default.aspx?s=AbstractTransactionalDataSourceSpringContextTests&btn=&la=*&li=*
- http://www.krugle.org/kse/entfiles?query=AbstractTransactionalDataSourceSpringContextTests
- http://codase.com/search/text?join=abstracttransactionaldatasourcespringcontexttests+&scope=join%2Fjoin
If you'd like to mention more sites like this, please share in the comments!