Limit & Order By Distinct or Group by Query?

I am trying to make a query that does the following...

If I have a table full of rows that have article_ids that look like...

1 - article_id = 1
2 - article_id = 3
3 - article_id = 3
4 - article_id = 9
5 - article_id = 1
6 - article_id = 3

So basically I want to retrieve the distinct rows, so grabbing them in a fashion where I get a single row for article_id 1, 3 and 9 - More so, I would like to order them by which one shows up, so 3 would come up first, then 1 and finally 9. Last but not least, I would like to limit it to something like 1 or 2 rows.

What kind of query do I need to accomplish this?

 

Are you looking for this?

SELECT article_id, COUNT(*) appearances FROM table 
GROUP BY article_id
ORDER BY appearances ASC 
LIMIT 2

Code (markup):