14 DAY TRIAL // There are several places where you can see which are the largest websites in the world. And there are plenty of ways of visualizing this, most analytics companies provide countless colorful graphs to choose from. But none of them are as fun as the one the people over at Nmap.org put together.
Nmap focuses on security and, among the tools it offers, it houses a script which can be used to match a site's favicon to an online database of known icons from around the web.
Looking to improve that script, the team parsed the top million sites on the web in an attempt to retrieve the favicon for each. This worked for only 328,427 sites and, of those, 39,482 responses were not actual images. That still meant that they managed to get their hands on 288,945 images.
With a treasure trove of favicons at its disposal, the team decided to have some fun and create an interesting way to visualize them, by displaying all of them in a single image with each favicon scaled based on the site's audience.
"The smallest icons--those corresponding to sites with approximately 0.0001% reach--are scaled to 16x16 pixels. The largest icon (Google) is 11,936 x 11,936 pixels, and the whole diagram is 37,440 x 37,440," Nmap explains.
The result is a dizzying image which is actually quite fun to explore, especially once you zoom in a little to uncover the smaller sites. Scanning the image, looking for websites you recognize, can draw you in for quite a long time.
The traffic numbers come from Alexa, so accuracy is not great. There are several other caveats as well. The script attempted to recover the favicon for each site, but if this failed, no matter how big the site was, it simply wasn't featured in the image.
"This usually indicates that the main site timed out during the survey, and only less popular sites using the same icon responded. In other words, it represents a data collection error," Nmap explains some of the reason why a site may not show up or its icon may be smaller than you'd expect.
"For example, baidu.com didn't respond, but baidu.hk and baidu.jp did, and so what would have been one of the biggest icons is instead small," explains why one of the largest sites on the planet is so small in the visualization.
As a sidenote, Softpedia.com has a fairly large favicon just above Facebook gigantic icon.