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, ...)