Monthly Archives: December 2007

Model Statistics Pages

I’ve just release an update to Carsurvey.org, which displays average review scores for different model, region and year combinations. See the Ford Focus Statistics for an example, and note the warning about not reading too much into these statistics.

A few people have asked me for a similar feature over the years, and if it gets a lot of use, I’ll spend more time on improving it.

To clarify things for those who are interested, the averages displayed are arithmetic means. Whilst writing this feature, I experimented with more statistical language, and other statistical measures, but came to the conclusion that it was best to keep things simple.

The statistics pages are also being used to test a new URL structure.

Compare:

http://www.carsurvey.org/by-region/uk+and+ireland/ford/focus/statistics/

to an old style

http://www.carsurvey.org/countrymodelyear
_UK+and+Ireland_Ford_Focus_2004.html

Forced lower case, slashes instead of underscores, much easier to guess URLs, and all content from a particular region in its own subdirectory.

In case I forget, these changes also apply to the motorcycle and mobile phone sites.