So, Jeremy points out that looking at his blog logs ( or {b,}logs for those of you who use bash) that he gets an unholy amount of traffic from Google. Fair enough, there's a reason that they're number one. Jeremy doesn't really elaborate on his findings though.
So i spent some time going over my blog results for the past month too, just to see if there are any interesting trends. Surprisingly, there are.
For what it's worth, here's the baseline i have:
SELECT sum(if(referer like '%google%q=%',1,0)) as 'Google',
sum(if(referer like '%yahoo%p=%',1,0)) as 'Yahoo',
sum(if(referer like '%msn%q=%',1,0)) as 'MSN'
FROM `blog_accesslog`
where time between '2005-10-01' and now();
+--------+--------+--------+ | Google | Yahoo | MSN | +--------+--------+--------+ | 714 | 84 | 64 | +--------+--------+--------+
Hmm… kinda high for google, but more importantly, i noticed something else. Sorting by who is hitting me and where they're going turns up a LOT of duplication.
If i group by the remote host and path i get:
+--------+--------+--------+ | Google | Yahoo | MSN | +--------+--------+--------+ | 332 | 25 | 18 | +--------+--------+--------+
i'm not quite sure i know why i get the duplication. They're (technically) different hits because the associated time is different and there's no set pattern about the number of repeat queries per host, yet all of the search engines do this. Granted, there's probably something wrong in how i'm doing my logs, so i'm willing to ignore that for now. Suffice to say that i get several multiples of traffic from Google than i do from Yahoo.
It's also no great surprise that the bulk of queries i'm getting are for the curl/php write up, followed by the perrenial "Annoying Questions" query.
The other thing that was surprising was that google wasn't where i got the bulk of my traffic. That honor went to Yahoo!.
"But, how is that possible", i hear you cry? Well, because of a goof i noticed when i first built out my query. If i just looked for "yahoo.com" i got well into the thousands of links. This included links from My.Yahoo, MyWeb2.0, bookmarks, 360, and other harder links.
So, who's the search engine that folks use most? Google.
What do most folks use to find me? Yahoo.
Odd.
