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.
