Number of Members on LessWrong

I wanted to know how many people have joined LessWrong but I couldn’t find anything stating the number of members on LessWrong anywhere on the site or the internet, so I decided to MacGyver it out of Google:

site:lesswrong.com/user—”submitted by” -”comments by”

(Translation provided at the end.)

This gets a similar result in Bing and Yahoo:

”lesswrong.com/user″

If this is correct, LessWrong has over 9,000 members, but my LessWrong population figure is likely to be low. Since it was so hard to find out how many users LessWrong has, I decided to post it. I can’t be the only curious person.

Why my figure is likely to be on the low side (and general inaccuracies):

- Some users may not be included in Google’s index yet. For instance, if they have never posted, there may be no link to their page (which is what I searched for—user pages), and the spider would not find them. This may be restricted to members that have actually commented, posted, or have been linked to in some way somewhere on the internet.

- Search engine caches are not in real time. There can be a lag of up to months, depending on how much the search engine “likes” the page.

- It has been reported by previous employees of a major search engine that they are using crazy old computer equipment to store their caches. I’ve been told that it is common for sections of cache to be down for that reason.

- Some of the results in Bing and Yahoo were irrelevant, though I think I weeded them pretty thoroughly for Google if my random samples of results pages are a good indication of the whole.

Go ahead and check it out—stick the code in Google and see how many LessWrong members it shows. You’ll certainly get a more up-to-date total than I have posted here. ;)

Translation for those of you that don’t know Google’s codes:

site:lesswrong.com/user

”Search only lesswrong.com, only the user directory.”

(The user directory is where each user’s home page is, so I’m essentially telling it “find all the home page directories”.)

-”submitted by” -”comments by”

Exclude any page in that directory with the exact text “submitted by”, exclude any page with the exact text “comments by”

(The submissions and comments pages use a url in that directory, so they will show up in the results if I do not subtract them. Also, I used exact text specific to those pages, so that the text in the links on user home pages do not get user home pages omitted from the search.)