WSJdpatton writes to mention that Carl Bialik has an interesting look at why good data can be hard to find, much less understand, online. He cites a couple of examples, both Google's first-quarter performance numbers and Alexa's revamp of their number-tracking process. "Now Alexa is incorporating other sources of data -- though it says the prior ranking "wasn't wrong before, but it was different." Some sites saw big changes in their rankings following Alexa's move: The tech blog TechCrunch said it fell far from its prior position in Drudge Report territory (rarefied air in Web-traffic terms). On Friday afternoon, Drudge Report ranked 545th, compared with TechCrunch's ranking of 1,784th, according to Alexa's new math."

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