Lots of people like to rank things, let's see who does it the best. Quick note though - rankings and ratings aren't the same thing. You know about Consumer Reports and At the Movies with Siskel (RIP) and Ebert (RIP), right? They rate things, as oppose to rank things. So I'm not talking about those. I'm talking about these:
10. Ranker
Ranker.com is a website that supposedly allows people to rank things. I just clicked its first three articles and in all of them the numbers got higher rather than lower as you went on. That's the opposite of ranking. That's just a stupid list. Ranker.com sucks.
9. David Letterman
Remember how David Letterman did those Top 10 Lists? Yeah, that was a thing.
8. Search Engines
These are kind of rankings, right? Like the first one that comes up is the #1. I dunno. Maybe not. I really needed to have ten different things on this list, so just accept this one as a form of ranking whether you agree or not.
7. Alexa
It ranks Internet sites by how many people visit them and stuff. Big deal. Whatever.
6. US News and World Report
This used to be an actual physical magazine and it debuted in 1933. Now it's a website that largely just ranks various nonsense. Colleges. Healthcare. Jobs. Hotels. In fairness it has been ranking nonsense for a while. Its college rankings go back to the 80's. Kudos to it for at least realizing that print media was dead and adjusting to the Internets.
5. Charles Edward Spearman, Fellow of the Royal Society (RIP)
The designer and namesake of Spearman's rank correlation coefficient (often denoted by the Greek letter ρ [rho]), a nonparametric measure of rank correlation which can be described as the statistical dependence between the ranking of two variables. So there you go. Good work Spearman, you knew how to rank shit so well.
4. Gawker (RIP, sorta)
Gawker ranked/ranks a lot of crap. And I guess here I'm talking about the whole of Gawker Media (which still exists as a subsidiary of Univision, short of Gawker itself). Gawker even had a rankings.gawker.com sub-site between 2013 and 2015 that just ranked stuff. But in general, all of the Gawker Media sites ranked a whole bunch of things. I guess they were/are good-ish at it. But the sub-site was really unnecessary what with a lot of the rest of their websites ranking things all the time anyway.
3. Cracked
Cracked was a horrible, fake Mad Magazine knock-off that nobody cared about and that eventually re-invented itself as a website that ranks things. I suppose it's pretty good at doing this. Although I really haven't visited the website in years because it doesn't really work that well on my computer for some reason. It always freezes up my browser. Is it some adblocker I have? Is it the fact that I'm still on Firefox like a cave person? I'm not quite sure. If I cared enough I'd have looked into why my computer comes to a grinding halt whenever I visit this website that I once enjoyed. Instead I just stopped going to it. Half the stuff was poorly researched anyway.
2. Sports
Sports loves ranking things. College football, and so on. Yeaaaaaa, ranks!
1. Ed Ranks Everything
Duh.
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