web-analytics 11

This graph is the number of referrals Microsoft’s new search engine, Bing, sent to my site over the last few days. Looks like the hype is dying out. Though Bing did leapfrog Yahoo briefly, that lasted just one day.

I’m quite busy on a project right now, and don’t get time to write long articles. So for a while, I’m going to stick to short notes on interesting stuff. Peter Bregman has a very interesting piece on Why You Should Encourage Weakness. It boils down to a choice: do you focus on on improving strengths or minimising weaknesses? Conventional performance evaluations focus on the latter. I very strongly support Bregman’s view on this. The weakness isn’t why you hired the person! Unless it’s killing the organisation, just leave them to focus on their strengths. Google Analytics has a fairly interesting API that I hadn’t explored until recently. Picked up [Advanced Web Metrics with Google Analytics](http://www.s-anand.net/amazon-browser.html#advanced web metrics with google analytics) and learnt that you can track outbound clicks, page load times, Javascript events and error logs, almost anything at all using Google Analytics. You can also mirror the logging on your local server using pageTracker._setLocalRemoteServerMode() The whole concept of a Sandbox environment seems to be picking up within Google. There’s a Checkout sandbox, an AJAX API playground, an AdWords sandbox, an AdSense API sandbox, the Mapstraction API sandbox, even an event called Developer Sandbox. (After saying Sandbox 6 times, I feel a bit like Hobbes.)

When I analysed my HTTP log last week, I had another motive: are there enough people accessing my site on a mobile device? Or is it too small at this stage for me to care about? Well, have a look at the numbers. Windows98.4% Mobile0.6% Linux0.5% OS X0.5% Yes, there are more people accessing my site through a mobile device than there are using Linux or OS X. That's shocking! ...

One out of every 5 hits to my site is from a bot. I spent a fair bit of time this weekend analysing my log file for last month (which runs to gigabytes, and I ended up learning a few things about file system optimisation, but more on that later). 80% of the hits were from regular browsers. 20% were from robots. Here's a sample of the user-agents: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Yahoo! Slurp; <a href="http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/slurp)">http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/slurp)</a> Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +<a href="http://www.google.com/bot.html)">http://www.google.com/bot.html)</a> Mediapartners-Google DotBot/1.0.1 (<a href="http://www.dotnetdotcom.org/#info">http://www.dotnetdotcom.org/#info</a>, [email protected]) Mozilla/5.0 (Twiceler-0.9 <a href="http://www.cuill.com/twiceler/robot.html)">http://www.cuill.com/twiceler/robot.html)</a> msnbot/1.1 (+<a href="http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)">http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)</a> FeedBurner/1.0 (<a href="http://www.FeedBurner.com)">http://www.FeedBurner.com)</a> Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; attributor/1.13.2 +<a href="http://www.attributor.com)">http://www.attributor.com)</a> WebAlta Crawler/2.0 (<a href="http://www.webalta.net/ru/about_webmaster.html)">http://www.webalta.net/ru/about_webmaster.html)</a> (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; ru-RU) Yandex/1.01.001 (compatible; Win16; I) ... You get the idea. The bulk of these are search engines. Over two-thirds of the bot requests were from Yahoo Slurp. Now, this struck me as weird. If I take the top 3 search engines that are sending traffic my way, ...

These are the most bookmarked pages on my site: My home page Excel tips Calvin & Hobbes quotes (I typed them all) Indian torrents (I have a search engine for Indian torrents) Tamil Transliterator (Lets you type Tamil in English) Tamil songs quiz Movie quote quiz My best links Top 10 lists But this post is not about these links. It’s about how I found this out. Think about it… how could I know what pages have been bookmarked? The browser doesn’t send any information about bookmarks. ...

Microsoft adCenter Labs has a demographics prediction engine. Based on a person's search queries and web sites visited, it can predict their gender and age. So I tried that on parts of the body, to see what men were interested in vs women. topicmalefemale hair25%75% eyes33%67% cheek33%67% hands33%67% lips36%64% ears39%61% fingers40%60% forehead42%58% nose43%57% neck46%54% beard55%45% moustache58%42% leg60%40% palm61%39% toe64%36% While I can understand men being more interested in beards and moustaches (perhaps even legs), why are they far more interested in toes than women? ...

On a related note, 60% of the search queries that lead to my site this year were Calvin and Hobbes quotes. “i can’t help but wonder what kind of desperate straits would drive a man to invent this thing.” topped the list (Calvin referring to a yo-yo), with i always catch these trick questions following closely. People searching for Excel related stuff were next (20%): excel indirect(address(, row() excel offset address and the like. ...

Almost no site has linked to my page. (I sort of like that a bit. It means the 30-odd hits a day that I get are from people who TYPE my URL.)

Wednesday seems the most popular day for visiting my site. While I get 14 visitors a day on average, I seem to get 22 visitors on Wednesdays.

I’m using Analog for analysing the IIMB webserver stats. Anyone with enthu, find a better log analyzer and mail me its name.

Whose sites are the most popular on this server? Last month, the top 10 sites were admissions, placement, Prof. Srinivasan’s, and Prof. Bandi’s. I ran http-analyze to get these results.