Number of people on government websites now

[plasma_beam]

This site went live in 2015 and hasn't changed too much since then. Participating agencies have their google analytics data collected by GSA, which is hosting this webpage.

It's very useful, and I've referred to this site many times over the years (probably bc a couple sites I've worked on are in the top 50!).

For those people wanting other awesome and informative govt sites, take a look at https://www.usaspending.gov/, which has all government contracts data easily searchable (and bookmarkable).

https://18f.gsa.gov/2015/03/19/how-we-built-analytics-usa-go...

[reaperducer]

Participating agencies have their google analytics data collected by GSA, which is hosting this webpage.

Mostly off-topic, but the GSA is one of those federal agencies that is really under-appreciated.

When I was a reporter in the days before the commercial internet (yes, my tools were pencil, typewriter, and teletype), the GSA would publish lists of what government reports were coming out each month, helping you find all kinds of incredibly useful data. If you needed help, you just picked up a phone and they would point you in the right direction. I always looked forward to getting their big blue envelopes in the mail at work because I knew I could find something meaningful in there that I could localize for my audience. And the information was always presented in a manner that was both professional, and easy to understand.

The GSA is one of those agencies that is best left alone to do its work in obscurity. Every once in a long while, a politician will stick his nose in there, but usually only to get a name put on a building.

See also: The Congressional Budget Office.

[eminence32]

I bet the US government has lots of useful websites that I've never even heard of. But every now and again I randomly stumble across one (like the one from your comment), and it makes me wonder if there is a "discovery problem" here. What other useful govt sites are out there, but are unknown to me.

[jwithington]

Thanks for sharing that link to USA Spending! Seems like a lot of interesting information is buried there…and they have an API!

[ralferoo]

Wonder if tomorrow, the analytics site will show up as the top most visited government website!

[boomboomsubban]

Under "Visitor locations right now," 1% are coming from Graceville. As far as I can tell, that's either a town of 4k in Australia, 2k in Florida, or there are two Gracevilles in Minnesota with a few hundred people. Any idea what's up?

[TonyTrapp]

It might be a default set of coordinates used for geolocation of some IPs used in a larger region (or even state). This sort of thing has in fact caused trouble in the past at least once: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/aug/09/maxmind-m...

> IP mapping isn’t an exact science and so MaxMind assigns a default address when it can’t identify its true location. That address just happened to be the Arnolds’ property, a remote farm that is located slap-bang in the middle of America.

> More than 600 million IP addresses are associated with their farm and more than 5,000 companies are drawing information from MaxMind’s database.

[gibolt]

I'd guess either some ISP/VPN is masking to that location, or a block of ips incorrectly map to that spot (perhaps by the library they are using to determine location from ip)

[echelon]

Firefox's usage percentage is upsetting.

I hope they don't die, but this looks really bad for them.

[rypskar]

It seems like this data is from Google analytics, which is not only blocked but also is being shimmed by Firefox, at least when strict privacy is enabled. So this do not show the correct number of Firefox user, only the users without privacy protection enabled and without any tracking blocker

[amelius]

I don't understand why large companies ban Gmail but allow Chrome. They should be using Firefox instead.

[ayngg]

Aren't they basically being kept alive by Google at this point? Almost 90% of their revenue is from that one deal at it has felt like they have been more concerned with other initiatives for a while now.

[ycuser2]

3% of almost billions(?) of browser users are still a fews millions of Firefox users. Millions of users is not "dead".

[ricardobayes]

I used to love Firefox, but fell out of love majorly. First there's a still long-standing bug (5 years and counting) that newly opened tabs don't have access to localstorage. Then 96.0 broke a lot of our code somehow. Cross-checked with 95 and everything still worked fine.

[firechickenbird]

Apple covers 45.3% of the visits, that's insane

[yftsui]

Indeed, very surprising to see it below 50% given iPhone accumulated market share over the years.

[mobilio]

And Safari - >36%

[substructure]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but this shows that in the last 90 days 5.06 billion visits came from 31.3% Windows while 1.1% were from GNU/Linux. If we assume that both groups visit government websites equally often, then for every GNU/Linux user there exist (31.3/1.1) = 28.5 Windows users. Scary stuff.

[NavinF]

1.1% is way too high. I bet they didn't filter out all the scrapers that poll gov't websites.

Hmm I wonder if just parsing the HTML still works like it did 8 years ago when I had to scrape the USPS: https://github.com/NavinF/USPS-scraper/blob/master/USPS_scra... As long as the USPS only allows API requests from browsers (as opposed to the much more common situation where you need to update the status of every tracking number in a database), people still have to scrape their website pretending to be a browser.

[haroldp]

For what it's worth, Linux is over represented in the (fake) User-agent strings of the bots that attack my web servers. Most probably are indeed on linux, since they are predominantly scripts running on cloud providers. :)

[fareesh]

In my social circles I know a grand total of zero GNU/Linux users. I am the only one

[mywaifuismeta]

> If we assume that both groups visit government websites equally often

My pattern matching experience from real life tells me that this is unlikely....

[georgyo]

This is heavily skewed by iOS being used for USPS shipping.

The following is for people logging into government services, it is a better source for metrics on browsers/OS usage.

https://analytics.usa.gov/general-services-administration/

[iqanq]

Really you assume there are as many Linux users as there are Windows users, or am I misunderstanding you?

[hollerith]

Chromebooks have high (unit) sales (some say) but I've yet to see any signs that they are used a lot. Here only 1.4% of visits are from ChromeOS.

[Shalomboy]

The fact that a lot of Chromebooks are being sold is fairly solid; I would reckon that the questionable claim is that Chromebooks have strong sales traction with retail consumers. I bought myself a Lenovo Duet tablet last fall because I wanted a device that could last multiple days with intermittent streaming use and I missed the feeling of a cramped 10" netbook. I got it on sale for $200 USD and was floored by how nice the experience was on a PC that cheap. But friends and family who saw me with the tablet were shocked that I, an adult who likes computers, owned a Chromebook. I only know one other person IRL with a personal chromebook, and they bought it after being given a school-deployed one in college.

[Rastonbury]

Is it mainly students in schools? They wouldn't have much reason to access govt sites yet

[riskable]

My anecdote: A lot of people seem to be using Chromebooks to replace tablets (because good, non-Amazon tablets that aren't expensive are rare these days). You can pick up a $250 touchscreen Chromebook that works as a vastly superior web-browsing and video-watching device than a $250 Samsung tablet.

[agloeregrets]

Keep in mind that the majority of all fed gov visits are USPS tracking pages and the like. Chromebooks are majority used by students so I would expect this.

[jedberg]

Every Chromebook I've seen in the wild is being used by a student or teacher. I suspect students don't have many reasons to visit government websites.

[dhogan]

My whole local library is full of Chromeboxes. Maybe things like that make an impact.

[Aeolun]

Yes, the only place with less visitors than the ‘Department for Housing and Urban Development’ is the ‘National Science Foundation’.

Sign of the times?

[kortilla]

But why would a regular person visit those sites? I hold a PhD and I think I visited the nsf website <50 times during my entire academic career.

[lkbm]

Looks like it converts URLs to lower-case in the "Top Pages" list. One of the most visited sites right now is listed as https://jwst.nasa.gov/content/webblaunch/whereiswebb.html but that's a 404. Actual URL has a capital L: https://jwst.nasa.gov/content/webbLaunch/whereIsWebb.html

[caaqil]

From the data at https://analytics.usa.gov/data/live/browsers.json, Microsoft Edge has more than 2x the users of Firefox (322,890,632 vs 143,040,483).

[gibolt]

That makes sense considering Edge is a default browser on the most popular (desktop) OS, and this is from a random distribution of users.

[antisthenes]

124 people still rocking Netscape!

[ixnus]

Also shows a shocking 90,832 users viewing who are users of 'BestBuy'.

[NV2k9JtLJpba5BN]

`totals.browser` contains user agents (or something similar).

Why are there (personal?) email addresses in there as well? Who sets that as their user agent?

[ricardobayes]

What's 'Mercary_d'? 4 million page views over 90 days and haven't even heard of it yet. Same for 'Welltory'.

[tradertef]

India is 7.7% of total traffic and China is 5%. It is night now, but still these numbers are surprisingly high.

[boomboomsubban]

The most common website is USPS by a significant margin. Could that explain much of the international traffic?

[dmode]

My guess is this is mostly related to immigration and travel related

[H8crilA]

Both of these countries have around 1.4B people. 1B people is around 17x Germany, or around 21x the UK.

[908B64B197]

The US consulates and embassy in China are the only reliable source of information regarding air quality and pollution.

Also, India having a large number of English speakers, probably has a significant percent of the population that prefers getting COVID-19 info from the CDC.

[jorgesborges]

Indeed, as I look now 42% of all traffic is international.

[flypaca]

Probably just looking at immigration/Embassies related websites. It is day time in India and China.

[Victerius]

Breakdown:

By device type:

Mobile 53.7%

Desktop 44.1%

Tablet 1.9%

By browser:

Chrome 48%

Safari 36.2%

Edge 6.4%

Firefox 2.8%

My personal conclusions:

Tablets remain a niche product, Firefox is dead, and Edge will be dead in a few years if it can't eat more market share, which it won't.

[amitport]

It's not dead. US gov sites do not represent the entire web.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers

[mrintellectual]

I am fairly certain this is a side effect of people sharing this link through messaging apps, thereby inflating Chrome (default browser for Android devices) and Safari (default browser for Apple devices) relative to Firefox.

[sersi]

The problem is that a lot of Firefox users block google analytics, so it would not surprise me that Firefox is very much underrepresented.

[reaperducer]

Tablets remain a niche product

iPads don't show themselves to be iPads. They read as full computers.

It's an anti-profiling feature Apple added a few years ago.

[tomcam]

Many many tablets are reported as mobile

[warvariuc]

It means that Edge is less used within Mobile device type.

[patcon]

Ack. I've used PubMed for over a decade (since it was taught as the de facto way to search the science literature in my Canadian university) and it never occurred to me that it was a US federal government website :facepalm:

[EricE]

Any home page with FOIA in the footer is probably a US Government website :) Same if they also have usa.gov as a link.

[politelemon]

When it says "now", how "now" do they mean? I've refreshed a few times and the number hasn't changed (171,533). I went to cisa.gov (disabled all my blockers) but the number here is still the same over here.

[qwertox]

While I was looking at the data, the ranking of the top visited pages changed without reload, so I assume it is streamed in real-time. But I guess that the real-time data comes from aggregated and somewhat delayed data.

[jaywalk]

If you open up DevTools and look at the requests, realtime.json contains a "taken_at" property which shows that the data is updated every five minutes.

[boomboomsubban]

It's now showing 168,571 people, maybe it's every few minutes or possibly every hour as it's x:05 currently.

[throwaway89374]

This does not seem to work correctly. I visited from separate browsers and the number remains the same.

[ixnus]

It updates every 5 minutes.

[drugstorecowboy]

In state government, many desktops are set up with the agency's website as the browser homepage with no way to change it. I would think federal government is the same, that alone might skew some of these statistics.

[fareesh]

Is it possible to FOIA how much it cost the US government to build this page?

[EricE]

Sure - but as others pointed out there is a pretty good blog post that goes over it: https://18f.gsa.gov/2015/03/19/how-we-built-analytics-usa-go...

And you can see the code and development lifecycle on github: https://github.com/18F/analytics.usa.gov

Pretty lightweight for what it is.

[reaperducer]

Yes. But it's probably faster and easier to just look online. The data is very likely there.

[Jolter]

Only one way to find out.

[encryptluks2]

As someone pointed out in another thread, there is something fishy going on with these with a high percentage of usage coming from Graceville. Who knows if they are spoofing user agents and what not.

[dgoldstein0]

perhaps there's an internet exchange in one of the Graceville's, and it accounts for traffic from nearby cities too?

I noticed that San Jose makes the list, as does LA and Seattle right now, but no San Francisco. I suspect that SF traffic goes through San Jose and thus most of the bay area appears as San Jose in their numbers. Not a big leap to imagine this happens in other places too.

[Axsuul]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30004042

[erwincoumans]

From the info, it looks like a lot of the recent traffic is due to the free COVID test.

[m4tthumphrey]

Visitor Locations Now: London 2%

Clearly a HN hug!

[nitn]

Why is the government using Google Analytics (which is now illegal in some countries) instead of self hosting an analytics solution.

[qiqitori]

Back in my day, the mantra was "Information wants to be free", and laws limiting freedom on the internet and freedom of information were looked down upon.

[hhh]

Is it illegal in the United States?

[notatoad]

is there a self-hosted alternative that provides the same functionality?

[xeromal]

Easy