January 3, 2006

2005 Chuggnutt Zeitgeist

It's time for another edition of the Chuggnutt Zeitgeist, in the spirit of Google and since I did one last year. Interesting stuff, if you're into blogs and stats and such. On to it!

  • Number of blog entries: 244. Last year: 306.
  • Approximate total number of words: 39,810. Last year: 45,537
  • Average words per blog entry: 163.2. Last year: 148.8

    It only looks like I wrote less than last year, but you know what? I was also writing on The Brew Site. I'm doing a Zeitgeist post over there too, but the quick numbers are 222 posts and 38,371 words... which combined, yields 466 posts and 78,181 words. Surpassed!

  • Total visitors: 633,110. This is unfiltered, so it includes bots, spiders, RSS readers, etc. Last year: 242,433
  • Average visitors per day: 1,734. Last year: 687
  • Total real visitors (approximate): 430,505. This is the actual number, with most of the bots and such filtered out.
  • Average real visitors per day: 1,179

    This year I made the attempt to show actual visitors to the site, not just the automated stuff out there. To that end I filtered out anything identifying itself as a spider, known RSS feed slurpers/readers, bots, crawlers, and non-browser agents. I didn't get everything out, but this is a pretty decent snapshot. Note this doesn't speak to unique visitors; the stat package I'm using doesn't classify that and I'm not using Sitemeter or anything that supposedly tracks unique visitors. I imagine a good part of the total visitors are repeat visits, so I won't hazard a guess as to how many unique hits are there.

  • The most active month was October, by a long shot, because of the Burger King mask post—people were hammering this post looking for a Burger King Halloween costume. Not surprisingly, this post has also garnered the most comments: 673
  • There were three days on which traffic spiked considerably: April 30, with 9,152 visitors; July 20, with 7,575 visitors; and August 18, with 8,915 visitors. Unsurprisingly, those appear to be times when I was FARKed—that is, someone linked to one of my pictures from the FARK forums.
  • Ten most popular blog entries:
    1. The Burger King creeps me out: 28,910
    2. Houston's glass public toilet: 9,610
    3. My Burger King mask post is on fire!: 9,511
    4. Goofy Burger King job flyer: 5,234
    5. The Donald Trump/Bend urban legend: 4,879
    6. Leonard Nimoy's Bilbo Baggins: 4,862
    7. Super Wal-Mart: 4,619
    8. Central Oregon's biggest baby?: 3,821
    9. Leeroy Jenkins!: 3,781
    10. Never ending fall: 3,017
  • Total number of comments (not counting spam): 1,556
  • Most popular searches on this site:
    • burger king: 34
    • burger king mask [variants]: 24
    • i want to buy the burger king mask: 5
    • Beaubien [variants]: 28
    • z21: 27
    • ktvz: 8
    • html2text: 24
    • trump: 10 (plus 3 variants)
    • donald trump: 6
    • donald trump bend: 3
    • donald trump bend oregon rumor: 3
    • (Total Trump related: 25)
    • fantastic 4 cash card [variants]: 14
    • fantastic 4 [variants]: 16
    • bend oregon [variant]: 14
    • bend: 12
    • php: 12
    • blog: 12
    • amazon: 11
    • lovecraft: 10
  • Ten most popular search engine searches landing here:
    1. burger king mask: 5,295
    2. boba fett: 3,086
    3. pdb reader: 1,972
    4. free palm ebooks: 1,805
    5. darth maul: 1,534
    6. kermit the frog: 1,376
    7. leeroy jenkins: 1,221
    8. www.amazon.com/burgerking: 1,210
    9. super walmart: 973
    10. palm reader: 877
  • Top five search engines:
    1. Google: 72,180
    2. Yahoo: 20,629
    3. MSN: 4,042
    4. AskJeeves: 1,259
    5. AOL Search: 1,061
  • Here's the approximate breakdown of browsers and agents, gleaned from the full numbers:
    • Internet Explorer: 61% of all traffic
    • Mozilla/Netscape browsers (Firefox mostly, I think): 23%
    • Opera: 1%
    • RSS readers/agents: 2%
    • Bots/search engine crawlers: 8.2%
    • Other stuff (random bots, feed readers, crawlers, obscure browsers): 4.8%
  • Among real visitors, some surprises in country of origin (I'm not listing all country stats here; suffice to say, the U.S. and Canada are the top two):
    • China: 13,221 visitors
    • Malaysia: 1,930
    • Uruguay: 1,371
    • Sweden: 912
    • Saudi Arabia: 899
    • Greece: 524
    • Iran: 450
    I'm surprised I'm that popular in China.

Posted by jon at 8:54 PM


October 4, 2005

My Burger King mask post is on fire!

The Burger King mask post I made back in April is insanely out of control; right now, it has 59 75 comments on it, mostly from people who want one of those masks (and one or several guys who claim to be making it, or have it for sale)! It's such great entertainment to watch the comments roll in.

I'm getting so many hits on this because of great search engine placement for "burger king mask." On Google, I'm number 5 and on Yahoo, number 3(!). Man, I wish I could plan posts like that one...

Posted by jon at 4:29 PM


November 16, 2004

Referrers, search engines, trends

Going through my site's logfiles, I figured it's about time for one of those navel-gazing site-analyzing posts. I've noticed some trends along the way, I think.

By far, the most search engine hits I get are from Google; over the past 30 days, I clocked 2,617 hits from Google, nearly four times more than Yahoo at 763 hits. In fact, the top ten search engines are:

1 Google 2,617
2 Yahoo 763
3 MSN 188
4 Altavista 82
5 AskJeeves 61
6 AOL Search 35
7 Netscape 20
8 AllTheWeb 16
9 Mamma 4
10 Lycos 4

I'm a little surprised by the amount of variation there.

The trends I've noticed are in the breakdown of what people are searching for from each site. Most of the Google searches are for free Palm ebooks, Matrix names, and variations on those themes; it seems that people are using Google to find specific types of information, knowing the parameters of what they're looking for—targeted. The other search engines, on the other hand, seem to better reflect pop cultural references and more general searching. Among Yahoo searches, for instance, I see such phrases as, "boba fett" (number one), "kermit the frog," "dell dude," "a-team movie," and so on. Same for the others.

So I'd guess that in Google searches, when they find me I'm near the top of the lists for what they're searching for and the users are looking for specific things. On Yahoo and the others, though, it looks like people are more into browsing on vaguer searches, and clicking through on links that look interesting, but may not be relevant. The conclusion I'd draw from this (not surprisingly) is that Google users are power users, and the search engine people go to who want to really find something and get the job done, whereas Yahoo users are more casual, not so worried about the results, but they'll do in a pinch.

And of course, the best part of this whole entry: listing some of the best/worst search phrases people have actually typed to get here. All verbatim.

  • thongs in public
  • what's your name
  • purple flowers
  • jones green bean casserole soda
  • van helsing absinthe
  • donner party cannibalism
  • heroin
  • green bean soda
  • white trash sex
  • pong is a violent game
  • twas the night bush
  • green bean casserole soda
  • ugliest picture
  • topless rotten
  • skinsuits
  • donkey brew
  • if you had a male tiger what would you name it
  • snoop dog fir shizzle
  • frog master
  • fett ass
  • cracker ingredients
  • beer mugs carved in pumpkins
  • what is the proper way to charge cell and cordless phones
  • on the sierra nevada summerfest beer label what mountains are featured
  • is there a formula for figuring out when thanksgiving day will be
  • how do i clean vomit from couch
  • check out my wife
  • turkey soda
  • where is it snowing in the united states november 11, 2004
  • donner party beer
  • emachine turns it's self on
  • halloween hooch drink

Posted by jon at 12:23 AM


October 13, 2003

Navel Gazing

I've been reviewing the web server logs for my site, and decided to self-indulge and post some interesting stats here online to bore you all. Read on if you're interested.

More...

Posted by jon at 10:33 PM