A list that ranks its entries

The forms it takes

• Primary and backup, or main and alternative.
• Numbering, which reads as ranking whether or not it was meant to.
• A recommendation to try one first.
• Scores, marks, percentages or coloured indicators of any kind.

What a rank would need behind it

To rank the members of a set honestly, a page would need repeated measurements, taken from many places, over time, of things that are properties of the addresses rather than of paths. None of that is available to anybody outside the market.

A page that has none of it and ranks anyway is producing an editorial arrangement and presenting it as information.

Why it usually happens without bad intent

A list has to be printed in some order, and something has to come first. Labelling that entry primary feels like a helpful clarification rather than a claim, and it is quicker than explaining that no order exists.

The reader receives it as a claim regardless, because that is how labels work, which is the argument of reading order is not a ranking.

What it does to the reader

It converts a set of three into one address and two spares. Spares get forgotten, which is the mechanism in habit picking for you, and a forgotten spare is not a route.

It also creates a false event: when the primary is quiet, a reader who believes in primaries reads that as the market failing rather than as one route being quiet.

The second order damage

A reader trained to expect a rank will look for one on every page and will find something to read as one, even on pages that carefully avoid it. Arrangement, length, emphasis, anything.

That habit then travels to pages where the arrangement was chosen for reasons the reader knows nothing about.

Why this site prints them flat

The three strings at the top of every page here carry no labels, no numbers and no marks. That is a rule and it is stated openly rather than left to be inferred from the layout.

It is also the only arrangement consistent with the rest of the site. Every study argues that none of the three is the real one, and a mark beside one of them would contradict all of them at once.

The one ordering that is honest

The order they were supplied in, stated as such. It carries no information and does not pretend to, and it has the practical advantage of being stable, which makes comparing two sources quicker.

Anything beyond that needs evidence nobody has.

How to read a ranked list

Take the strings and discard the marks. The strings may be perfectly good. The marks are the part that was added by somebody, and they are the part that cannot be supported.

How a rank survives being removed

Even after a reader learns to discard the marks, the ordering stays, and orderings are read as ranks whether or not anybody intended one. That is why this study ends with an argument about arrangement rather than about labels.

The only defence is a stated arrangement: this is the order the strings arrived in, and it means nothing. Once that sentence is on the page, the reader has something to hold against their own reflex, and the reflex is what the mark was exploiting in the first place.

It is a small piece of writing that does more work than any amount of warning about ranked lists elsewhere.

What this study is not. It is not a criticism of any page that ranks, and no other site is assessed anywhere here.