This is the most popular colour on the internet, apparently

We know it's a question that's been keeping you up to the early hours: what is the most used colour on the internet?

Is it white? Or black? Or that lovely red they've got in the Google logo?

We'll give you a hint.

At least, that's what designer Paul Herbert discovered after he set about digging through the data of the ten most popular sites of the internet. 

He headed to Alexa.com, a site that maintains a list of the most visited sites on the internet, and set about mining it for data with a PHP code script he had written. Those ten sites? Google, YouTube, Facebook, Baidu (a Chinese web service), Yahoo, Wikipedia, Amazon, India's Google page, Qq (a Chinese instant messaging group) and Twitter.

With this data complete, Herbert then set about forming visual representations of the colours employed by each website. 

Herbert discovered that blue - in its various shades, hues and saturations - was the colour most employed by the ten most visited sites of the web.

Sure, there are a number of caveats: Herbert's system doesn't recognise colours in images or photos, while if a colour was found written in the website's text, it was included in his search; "For example if the phrase 'tan leather' is in a website's text, this scraper would say that the site uses tan. Additionally if the phrase 'I understand' is in the text, it would still count as tan."

Herbert hopes to further his investigation by expanding the number of websites included in his study, and include country-specific lists. 

Head to Herbert's site for a detailed look at all the colour data he's mined through so far - or send it to your mate who works in website design. They love this kind of stuff.

[Via: Wired.com]