The cc-webgraph-statistics site has been quietly doing its job for a while now: publishing harmonic centrality and PageRank data derived from Common Crawl's web graph, and letting researchers and the curious alike poke around the rankings.  It worked, but it didn't really sparkle.

That changes with this latest update, which brings a substantial redesign and a handful of genuinely useful new features. Here's what's new.

The most immediately visible change: all charts are now interactive. Previously the site rendered static images, which are fine for a quick glance but not much use if you want to zoom into a particular time window, hover over a data point, or scroll horizontally through a long series.  The charts now respond to all of the above.  If you're the sort of person who squints at trend lines and wants to know exactly what the value was in March 2021, you can now find out without firing up a spreadsheet.

This is the headline feature.  You can now search for any domain in the top 1000 domains and plot its harmonic centrality and PageRank scores across every Common Crawl crawl in which it appears.  Want to know how a site's web presence has evolved over the past few years?  Type it in and see.

It also supports side-by-side comparison of two domains, which makes it straightforward to benchmark one site against another, or to watch what happens to a domain's ranking around a notable event.  The domain lookup widget is also embeddable, so if you want to drop a live chart into your own page or post, you can. Check it out:

The avgindegree and avgoutdegree plots have been merged into a single avgdegree view, addressing a long-standing open issue.  The separation was never particularly illuminating in practice, and having them combined makes the overall picture easier to read.

Another issue closed: the harmonic centrality section now links to the relevant research papers. Harmonic centrality is not an especially intuitive metric for the uninitiated.  It measures how reachable a node is from all other nodes in a graph, weighted by inverse distance, and having proper references makes the methodology section considerably more useful.

The rank tables have been consolidated into a single unified table, with a few additions: SURT (Sort-friendly URI Reordering Transform) can now be toggled on or off depending on your preference, and filtering supports OR logic, so you can search for multiple terms at once.  There's also a clearer display of match counts.

The site now behaves considerably better on small screens.  Speed and performance are noticeably improved.

The updated site is available at commoncrawl.github.io/cc-webgraph-statistics.  The source is on GitHub, and feedback is welcome via issues or the usual channels.

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