B2B web sites - where to look for 'real' data

Regular readers will know that we've written on the topic of the inadequacies of our reliance on Alexa.com ratings (most recently here, back in April). The main problem we have is that really don't see any better alternatives.

The China Web 2.0 Review blog has an interesting post today on this topic. It talks about the potential to use search engines to compare web sites' popularity. The basic principle appears to be that the more times people have searched for a particular site would indicate (a) that it is more popular than others and (b) that its traffic may be comparably higher. Those who rank poorly on these tests would, of course, argue that it's simply because those doing the searches are not regular users and that may be a fair point.

The article refers to Baidu Index, Google Trends and Yahoo Buzz. Play around with them. I got some interesting results which not be entirely popular everywhere.