PopularityContest2005

 

Occasionally it's amusing to analyze web server log files and look at what's hot. At the moment on http://zhurnal.net/ the favorite search strings are a heterogeneous stew:

  • ocular migraine (and the plural "ocular migraines")
  • catfight
  • chi running
  • ultra man
  • dejah thoris
  • short skirt
  • detectives in togas
  • pirates versus ninjas
  • kohle yohannan
  • leet speek
  • the greatest invention
  • ultramarathon man
  • ceteris paribus
  • heifetz institute
  • max headroom
  • summa cum laude
  • ipod mini cooper
  • ley lines
  • wardrobe malfunction
  • physics words

The newer http://zhurnaly.com/ domain is attracting too few inquiries to reveal much of statistical significance, but leading the list for the past few months seem to be the literary duo:

  • emily dickinson
  • shakespeare

The older http://www.his.com/~z/ realm mainly draws seekers of countless variants on the themes of:

  • edward gibbon
  • decline and fall of the roman empire

In all cases search engine crawlers themselves account for a fair percentage of activity (perhaps 10% to 25%). On a typical day the http://zhurnal.net/ server delivers a few thousand pages, http://www.his.com/~z/ sends out several hundred, and http://zhurnaly.com/ comes in third with only a few hundred. (Counts of files/day and hits/day are higher, noiser, less interesting measures of activity.) Most non-robot visitors are using Microsoft's Internet Explorer, but ~10% appear to be Firefox fans. Windows dominates the operating system indicators, with Macintosh OS-X a few percent and LINUX plus others further behind. Non-US requests come in likewise at a few percent, led by Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom, Mexico, and Germany.

And as for internal wiki page faves, trailing behind the catch-all ActionNotDefined, the gateway front page ZhurnalWiki, and the utilitarian search tool FindPage, comes the mystical HowGreatThouArt. Don't ask me why ...

(cf. WebLogAnalysis (2001-06-02), CrudeMetrics (2003-02-09), VisitorStats (2003-10-17), ...)


TopicZhurnal - TopicProgramming - 2005-06-17



(correlates: CorrelationLog, HouseProud, DejahThoris, ...)