Digg VS Slashdot on Google Trends

In April of 2006, Digg surpassed rival website Slashdot, and entered the top 100 sites of the internet on Alexa’s rankings. According to Google Trends, Digg has now also passed Slashdot on google searches.

A little bit of background info.

Digg started by Kevin Rose, Owen Byrne, Ron Gorodetzky, and Jay Adelson in November of 2004, digg has quickly become one of the most visited websites on the internet. Digg is a community based news site, where users submit stories which are then placed in a holding area where they are voted on by the community. If a submission gets enough “diggs”, it is automatically placed on the front page. Digg has very quickly become one of the fastest growing websites on the web surpassing 200,000 registered users in April of 2006.

Slashdot(often referred to as /.) was started by Rob Malda in 1997, and is now owned by the Open Source Technology Group, part of VA Software. Much like digg, slashdot is also a community based news site. Users can submit news, which is also placed in a holding area. However, unlike digg, slashdot mods control what makes it onto their front page.

When a story makes it to the home page of either site, any linked sites associated with that story get flooded with traffic. Slashdot is know for it’s “Slashdot Effect”, which usually is referred to websites crashing from the flood of incoming traffic.

Although the core audience of these sites is different, they are often considered rival websites.