Compete announced today that they rolled out some enhancements to the Compete.com site. Compete is now a site I’m visiting more often to research web publishers and get a different look at data instead of just using Alexa.
The primary improvements they made were to their search feature. Their search is powered by Yahoo Search results which isn’t that unique, but they added a couple of things to make it an improved experience over just using Yahoo directly if you’re in site research mode. In the upper right corner of the screen a preview of the Compete snapshot will appear when you search for a term that’s likely to be a specific website. Such as this search for Apple.com shown in the screenshot below. You can see the traffic graph for Apple.com over a recent time period.
Additionally, if they have data showing that users spent a lot of time on any sites in the results for that term, they’ll highlight it by making them “Compete picks” that show up in the blue box. I found that I skipped over the box at first thinking they were sponsored ads, but now that I know it’s pretty helpful.
Compete also announced an API that allows developers to play with and use Compete data, which is of course cool. If more APIs were available from other data services I could build a tool to make my Web Revenue Blog Rankings automatic!
And last but not least, if you’re curious about how they get their data and how it compares to other services like Hitwise, Alexa, and Comscore, check out their detail matrix that explains it.
While I’d still like to see their overall data get more complete, I think Compete is on the right track. I also enjoy reading their blog as they highlight interesting data comparisons of top web properties.