Weekly Downloads Now Available in npm Package Search Results

We’re excited to announce a small enhancement to our package search results pages. Weekly download counts are now displayed for each npm package when searching on Socket. This recently requested feature adds more context to search results, giving users a clearer picture of package popularity at a glance.

Why Did We Add This?#

This improvement was inspired by a suggestion from developer Wes Bos on an episode of the Syntax podcast titled How to Pick a JS Package. Bos and co-host Scott Tolinski discussed what to look for in a package and the key factors you should consider before running the npm install command to bring a pile of new code into your application.

They discussed strategies for evaluating package quality, such as reviewing GitHub issues and activity, checking for TypeScript support, analyzing bundle size with tools like Bundlephobia, testing packages before integrating them, and assessing dependencies and usage examples through GitHub.

Bos also recommended searching Socket instead of npm if you want to get supply chain security checks, license information, and other package data related to code quality and maintenance. During this short segment Bos recommended that Socket's search results pages include more information about the number of downloads packages receive.

Weekly downloads are a key metric developers use to assess the reliability and popularity of a package, and we’re excited to make this data more accessible during searches on our website. Each search result now displays the number of weekly downloads alongside the existing score bars. This gives you a quick popularity gauge, so you can easily identify widely-used packages without having to click through to the individual package page.

The search on npm isn’t getting as many updates these days, so we’re aiming to deliver more meaningful improvements to help developers make better decisions. Understanding a package's adoption rate can be crucial when selecting dependencies for your projects.

While this feature is currently exclusive to the npm ecosystem, we're exploring possibilities to extend similar functionality to our package search for the other registries we support. Have feedback or more feature suggestions? We’d love to hear from you!