Today I’ve relaunched HitGeist.com, with fresh data from Alexa and much improved algorithm.
Visitor popularity trends have been not what TechCrunch usually writes about - there are many overseen websites which grow at astonishing rates. Many new companies emerge from around the world, for example, Russian vkontakte.ru is about to become #2 by daily unique visitors at local market, and Scandinavian countries have their own set of traffic-rich national players.
While sudden traffic surges are interesting, new HitGeist focuses on discovering websites which have shown steady growth, and assumes that when traffic is unstable, website is more likely to use non-natural means to attract traffic, such as advertising, PPC campaigns, spam, or spyware.
There are still some bugs to fix, but new stats were so breathtaking that I decided to share them as soon as possible.