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Probably because most of the data comes from comScore who, like Alexa, gets their data from a self-selected sample size. We're ever going to get truly accurate results this way.

Of course, I'm sure if the NSA put its mind to it (not happening), they could get a fairly accurate readout of the most popular sites for the US...

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I wonder how you'd collect that...log every DNS lookup at the ISP level? Surely they already do this.

I don't have an answer for you, but a simple DNS lookup at the ISP wouldn't get you the whole picture. Lot's of local/LAN DNS caching.

Probably count tcp/http connection to sites at ISP? Of course it's not easy or accurate for us. Not NSA ;)

Another option for conspiracy theorists is to just get data from apache logs etc., because, you know, NSA has access to everything.

You don't need the NSA to get that info. There are plenty of companies who aggregate data from ISPs.

Really? Does that data get made available in market reports?

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