How rankings work

Each question gets a Bayesian average, so a new site cannot jump to the top on a handful of votes:

score = (10 × m + Σ votes) ÷ (10 + n)

Here m is the average of all counted votes on that question across the whole site, n is the weight of this site's counted votes, and 10 is the number of "prior" votes every site starts with.

Popularity mixes two figures on a logarithmic scale, each compared with the highest value on the site, and maps the result onto 1 to 5:

popularity = 1 + 4 × (½ × visits share + ½ × voters share)

The overall score is the weighted mean of all of the above:

overall = (3 × Usefulness + 3 × Quality + 2 × Ease of use + 2 × Ad experience + 1 × Popularity) ÷ 11

• A newly approved site spends 7 days in open voting. Its scores are hidden during that time so early votes do not sway later ones.
• When the voting ends, the site is ranked if it has at least 25 counted voters from at least 3 countries. Otherwise it is listed under Others without a rank, keeps collecting votes, and is ranked as soon as it meets both thresholds.
• Each category's main list holds the 20 highest-scoring ranked sites. Everything else sits under Others. The main list is recomputed every Monday so it stays stable during the week, and at once when a site is archived or loses its Verified badge.
• No single country or network may contribute more than 60% of a site's counted weight. Anything above that is down-weighted, not discarded.

No system is impossible to cheat. The aim is to make manipulation expensive, visible and reversible. Every vote is stored as counted, held for review, or excluded, and scores can always be recomputed from the raw votes.

• Voting needs a Google account. One account has one vote per site per question; voting again changes the vote.
• An account must be at least 24 hours old before its votes are accepted.
• A new account's votes weigh half at first and reach full weight over its first five rated sites.
• The person who submitted a site, its verified owners, and any account sharing their network or device are excluded from that site's score.
• Per site, at most 1 vote is counted per address and 2 per network range. Extra votes are held for an editor.
• Votes from datacentre, VPN and Tor networks are held for an editor.
• If more than 50% of a site's votes (and at least 8) arrive within 60 minutes, come from accounts created within 24 hours of each other, or come from accounts less than 14 days old that have never rated anything else, the burst is held and flagged for an editor.
• Each site page shows how many voters were counted, how many countries they came from, and how many votes are held or excluded.

Only salted hashes of network and device details are stored, and they are deleted after 90 days. The country and network operator of a vote are kept with the vote so scores can always be recomputed. See the privacy policy.