Bits Pics: Visualizing the Web’s Icons

nmap

The data visualization above shows the “favicons” of nearly 300,000 Web sites on the Internet. Favicons are small images used to identify a Web site in the browser.

The sizes of the icons are based on the amount of traffic each Web site receives, using data from Alexa.com, a traffic and Web metrics site.

The project, which I came across via Gizmodo, is the work of two programmers, David Fifield and Brandon Enright. They work for a company called Nmap that makes open-source security programs.

To retrieve all the icons the programmers ran a programming script on the top 328,427 Web sites and looked for the associated icons for each site. The results found 288,945 images.

Favicons are usually 16 pixels square. The full image with all the sites’ icons is a massive 37,440 pixels square. As most browsers are not capable of displaying an image that large, Nmap also created an interactive version that offers the ability to zoom in and out.