I wrote a not-even-half-baked log-parsing script so I could go through my website logs and see how people were finding my site. With all due respect, I'm not interested in how my friends arrived at my site - they generally either have the URL bookmarked or in a feed reader or some combination thereof. No, this is targeted at the people who don't know me and wind up on my site (and hopefully find it interesting). I analyzed only the most recent week's logs: Feb 13 - Feb 19. I have my site's lifetime of logs, though, so I could feasibly run this analysis on the entire history, if I automated it a tad more.
I get the vast majority of my non-self-referred traffic from Google. This does not particularly surprise me. What does surprise me, though is some of the search queries that manage to land on my site. So I went back to Google and performed the same searches, and noted which result my site was, at the time of writing. All query strings are reproduced verbatim.
| Google query string | Google ranking | Referred page | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|
| 18F2550 linux | 7th | http://zarvox.org/usbsnes/ | Whoa. A chip name and "linux" gets you my website? Crazy. |
| Based on HID-Test by Christian Starkjohann | 4th | http://zarvox.org/usbsnes/ | So, that's the guy who wrote the V-USB library I used for that project. Does it merit a top-10 result? I doubt it. |
| drew fisher | 1st | http://zarvox.org/ | We already discussed this one :) |
| cr48 cut and paste shell to chrome qemacs | 4th | http://zarvox.org/shortlog/month | |
| pollingg routine in assembly language | 4th | http://zarvox.org/usbsnes/ | Spelling mistake is faithfully reproduced |
| nick peach hbgary | 22nd | http://zarvox.org/shortlog/month | This is what happens when a bunch of otherwise unrelated blog posts get indexed together. |
| zarvox | 5th | http://zarvox.org/ | |
| inside of ddr pads | Images: 31st | http://zarvox.org/ddrpad/gallery/ddr_pad_project/original_img_1118_jpg.jpeg | People seem willing to go through a lot more images than regular web results. |
| pg&e fee emergency power hook-ip | ??? | http://zarvox.org/shortlog/month | I have no idea. I couldn't find this result. |
| atmega328p | Images: 6th | http://zarvox.org/ddrpad/RedArrow.png | For some reason, I get a surprising number of Google Image results for the red and blue arrow schematics from that project. |
| Use Xbox 360 Dance pad on stepmania | 7th | http://zarvox.org/ddrpad/ | Here's what you do: you plug it in. That's all. |
| atmega328 led internal resistor pull-up | 8th | http://zarvox.org/ddrpad/ | |
| Drew Fisher | 1st | http://zarvox.org/ | Note the capitalization. |
| usb hid controller parts | 9th | http://zarvox.org/usbsnes/ | |
| drew fisher | 2nd | http://zarvox.org/resume.pdf | This one found my resume, which is a good second result after my website for my name, methinks. |
| v-usb hid report descriptor size calculate | 34th | http://zarvox.org/usbsnes/ | |
| pic micro snes controller usb | 5th | http://zarvox.org/usbsnes/ | And I didn't even use a PIC for that project. |
| how can i know if my usb snes adapter works | 2nd | http://zarvox.org/usbsnes/ | Try it out and see? Also, really? 2nd? |
| miraculin and effecting taste | ???? | http://zarvox.org/shortlog/month | Pedantic: wrong use of "effecting" |
| light dance pad | 10th | http://zarvox.org/ddrpad/ | I happen to know I'm #1 for "LED dance pad" |
| rock band keytar python script | ???? | http://zarvox.org/shortlog/month | I couldn't find this one in the results. Color me surprised. |
| at90USB breadboard | 37th | http://zarvox.org/usbsnes/ | I guess I mentioned that chip on my page, and how I didn't use it. |
| Drew Fisher berkeley | 4th | http://zarvox.org/resume.pdf | This search came from a Mac user in Germany. The first three results were from a class wiki and the BiD webpage. |
I also had one user manage to arrive at my site via Yahoo, with the query "arrow LED using microcontroller" which found http://zarvox.org/ddrpad/.
I had one visitor from a Windows 98 machine.
Today I learned the proper name for the condition where you have eyes of different colors: Heterochromia iridum. One of my friends in middle school had one golden eye and one brown one.
Comments:
Jono | 2011-02-19T20:03:45.101241
Careful - how did you search? Google customises heavily, so to get an idea of what other people see you need to logout, and perhaps go to an anonymous search website.Drew Fisher | 2011-02-19T20:10:03.596327
Jono: noting that behavior, I dropped cookies for the searches (yay, incognito mode!), but I recognize that even just my IP and User-Agent string may still influence search results.I could also try using my dedi as a SOCKS proxy, but this was late last night and I didn't feel like being that hardcore about it. I'd rather crowdsource it and have folks like you point out any discrepancies you find. :P