HTTP vs. HTTPS

When a browser connects to a web server there are two main protocols in which it can establish the connection: HTTP and HTTPS. HTTP stands for Hypertext Transfer Protocol and is practically the foundation of data communication for the Internet, this protocol is based on plain text being transfered over the net, that is, no security is involved. On the other side, HTTPS stands for Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure and the communication basics is just the same as in HTTP, the only difference is that it is implemented over a secured channel, that is, communication between browsers and web servers are encrypted and no plain text is transfered over the net. On our last data analysis of the web we found that 0.6% of domains use HTTPS while the other 99.4% use just HTTP

Redirects - Header vs. Meta

When a browser opens a URL, there is a probability that the URL is redirecting to another location. As an example, redirects are commonly used to serve appropiate content if a user is using a smartphone to browse a web page. We found that 1190787 domains redirected to another location when we visited them. There are two ways to make a redirect, the most commonly used is via http headers (a header is a piece of data that the web server sends to the web browser), if a redirect is done via headers, no html is downloaded. The other way is via HTML tags, and can be done via the meta refresh tag or via javascript code. We have found that 89.7% of the total redirects were done via http headers and 10.3% were done via html tags

WWW vs. no WWW

When a domain is set set to receive traffic from browsers, it is normally set under the subdomain "www" which stands for World Wide Web, that is, the Internet. The implementation of "www" as a subdomain is not mandatory and is a call every webmaster on the web can take, to use it or not to use it. In the last year a movement called no-www.org encourages the use of no www as a subdomain and just present the content on the domain itself. In our data analysis we found that 11.3% of the domains we crawled are using no www and 88.7% do use it.

Web Server War

Whenever a user opens a new page on a web site, the request is directed to and handled by a specific web server located in the hosting machine. Here are presented the most utilized web servers on the Internet. Please note that version numbers of web servers are omitted, that is, web servers are grouped without taking into account the version number. According to our statistics, the most utilized web servers among the web sites we visited are: Apache, Zope, Oracle-Application-Server-10g, IBM_HTTP_Server and nginx.

What we know about the Web

Domains	5,178,168
IP Addresses	5,946,499
Servers	51,959
Analytics IDs	1,211,257
Adsense IDs	134,992

These data was last updated on: 2013-05-20 01:00:09 (9 hours ago)

Another facts about the web

A common mistake made by webmasters is not to set an appropiate title to an specific web page, we have found that 3305 domain home pages have the word untitled in their html title tag. The description meta tag is very important for a web page's SEO, however, we have found that 711212 domain home pages are not using this extremelly useful tag. External links on web pages are useful for sending the visitor to another important resource they could be interesed in visiting, outgoing links algo serve as a way for trust to flow over the internet, however, we have found 253010 home pages with no external links at all.

Trivia

What is the longest domain name on your database?
Answer: The longest domain or our database is sportfishing-nassau-bahamas-paradise-island-fishing-charters.com.