Icons of the Web: Top 1,000,000 websites in one gigantic 37,440 x 37,440 image.

Ever dreamed of looking at a relatively organized image showcasing the top 1,000,000 websites using nothing more than their favicons? You’re in luck. The dirty work was done by nmap earlier this year (2010 for those of you who’ve forgotten…). Specifically, they used Alexa ratings to hone in on the top 1,000,000 sites and then ran two separate search queries for icons of any sort to give said websites a face. Per nmap’s words:

A large-scale scan of the top million web sites (per Alexa traffic data) was performed in early 2010 using the Nmap Security Scanner and its scripting engine.

We retrieved each site’s icon by first parsing the HTML for a link tag and then falling back to /favicon.ico if that failed. 328,427 unique icons were collected, of which 288,945 were proper images. The remaining 39,482 were error strings and other non-image files. Our original goal was just to improve our http-favicon.nse script, but we had enough fun browsing so many icons that we used them to create the visualization below.

The area of each icon is proportional to the sum of the reach of all sites using that icon. When both a bare domain name and its “www.” counterpart used the same icon, only one of them was counted. The smallest icons–those corresponding to sites with approximately 0.0001% reach–are scaled to 16×16 pixels. The largest icon (Google) is 11,936 x 11,936 pixels, and the whole diagram is 37,440 x 37,440

Google walks away with the top spot, holding an icon that is 11,936 x 11,936 pixels on it’s own. The entire image if expanded would equal 37,440 x 37,440. Any browser and pretty much any machine short of a supercomputer would vomit up ever organ…err…piece of silicon inside their aluminum and plastic bodies. So smaller, pannable/zoomable images ftw!

With that said, head on over to nmap’s site to tinker around with a slightly smaller, but pannable version of the image above, complete with search box (to make it easier) and all.

Site owners: where do you stand?

**For the record, Gadgetsteria’s icon is 32 x 32 — we’re not in last place. Wo0t!!!

Source:
Geekologie

Author: Mike Norris

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Gadget lover, smartphone collector, and beer connoisseur. I've been writing about gadgets for three years now and loving every minute of it. Outside of the digital landscape, I enjoy being active outdoors. I'm always up for a good conversation, so feel free to drop me a line!