PUBLICATIONS Inside Illinois Vol. 20, No. 5, Sept. 7, 2000

UI Web site considered most popular of Big 10 and 'most linked-to'

Becky Mabry, Assistant Editor
(217) 244-1072; mabry@illinois.edu

When it comes to Web sites, the UI's is the most popular one of the Big 10 Universities.

And the UI site is the largest of all academic Web sites with about 300,000 publicly available files, according to Steve Miller, research programmer and UI Webmaster.

And if that isn't enough to brag about, the UI is the most linked-to academic domain or "dot edu" site, Miller said.

"We're large, and we're the most linked-to, and so we interpret that as meaning that we're popular," he said. "In fact, USA Today Online ranked us within the top 25 sites of all time and all categories a few years ago."

One of the most popular Web sites on the uiuc.edu domain is the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, www.ncsa.uiuc.edu, which gets about 1 million hits a month, according to Karen Green, NCSA's public information officer.

"That's a conservative estimate," Green said. "We have over 100,000 pages and more than 200 servers. I think the site is ranked No. 40 in the world in terms of its being the most linked-to site."

Its popularity dates back to the early days of the Web in 1993 when NCSA put out the first versions of Mosaic, the first Web browser, she said.

"Since the early days of the Web we were a major player and a site where people would go to get software to work the Web," she said. "So there's that history, and I think we have so many pages and so many different things on it, it just sort of snowballs."

Another very popular site within the uiuc.edu domain is the Nutritional Analysis Tool hosted by the department of food science and human nutrition and Jim Painter, a professor in that department.

That site gets approximately 1.5 million hits a month, Miller said.

"It's popular because it analyzes your diet and provides reference numbers for calories and nutritional intake," he said.

The site, www.nat.uiuc.edu, has been up since April 1996, and though it was used initially by UI students for a food science class, it received national attention from an NBC affiliate in Miami about three years ago. Since then NBC stations all over the country have reported on it, and that publicity generated a lot of users, Painter said.

In addition, other universities began using it for their food science classes, Painter said.

About five students each semester add foods to the database, expanding it from the original 5,000 foods to now close to 7,000. A programmer also keeps it updated so it will be faster and more user-friendly, Painter said.

"Bubble-up enthusiasm is what makes our Web presence work," Miller said. "There's the strong interest among students in technology and the strong support of the colleges and departments. Our engineering and computer science expertise coupled with art and design influences, helped propel us, and gave us the intellectual resources to effectively use the Web.

"In the early days of the Web, the Krannert Art Museum was among an early adopter of the technology, having one of the most impressive and successful Web sites on campus, as they still do today at www.art.uiuc.edu," Miller said.