The
Nmap Project is pleased to release our new and improved
Icons of the Web project! Since our free and open source
Nmap Security Scanner software is all about exploring networks at massive scale, we started by scanning the top million web sites for 2013 (as ranked by the analytics company
Alexa). We then downloaded each site's
favicon—the small icon displayed next to a site title in browser bookmarks and tabs.
We scaled the icons in proportion to each site's monthly reach (popularity) and placed them in a giant collage. The smallest icons—for sites visited by only 0.00004% of the Internet population each month—are 256 pixels square (16x16). The largest icon (Google) is 394 million pixels. The whole collage is 5 gigapixels.
This is an update to a similar project we performed in 2010. That edition proved very popular. It was written up in the New York Times and other sites, exhibited at the
Newseum in Washington D.C., and even found its way into the Guinness Book of World Records (see the
press section for more). It is interesting to
compare the new data with the old to see how the Internet has evolved in recent years.
Since your web browser would likely choke on a 5 gigapixel image, we've created the interactive viewer below. It's divided into 813,200 small files which are only loaded as needed based on your location and zoom level. Click and drag to pan and use the mouse wheel (or toolbar) to zoom. For mouse wheel zoom, you may need to interact with the viewer first (e.g. drag something). A new feature this year allows you to hover your mouse over an icon to see the site name. You can also click on icons to visit the actual sites, but be careful with that! Even even sites with cute icons (like the
cartoon Hamster) can be pornographic or worse. We have also added a fullscreen viewing option.
To find your favorite site (or your own site), type in the domain name (example:
reddit.com) and hit search.
Our most common request in 2010 was for a physical poster version. We only printed them for Nmap developers last time, but now we're
making them available to anyone who orders by January 17.
