[chaz]

> Third party statistics sites like Alexa and Compete are horribly untrustworthy indicators of reality.

Alexa and Compete are bad sources.

Other third party sources like Quantcast, comScore, Nielsen, etc, do a better job of measurement, especially if they've been beaconed. You will never get complete agreement because of variations in implementation. A site's own "internal" analytics, like Google Analytics or Omniture, will never quite agree either.

Third party data is still ordinally and directionally correct most of the time. Google Trends and Quantcast both show a general trend upward, but it's not hypergrowth. What isn't mesaured here is engagement, and that's a much more interesting metric for Quora.

[1] http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=quora [2] http://www.quantcast.com/quora.com