Sunbeams illuminating a coastal forest in Port Orford, Oregon

Chuggnutt!

Category: Online

  • 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

  • What Kind of Elitist Are You?

    HASH(0x8a97e94)
    You speak eloquently and have seemingly read every
    book ever published. You are a fountain of
    endless (sometimes useless) knowledge, and
    never fail to impress at a party.
    What people love: You can answer almost any
    question people ask, and have thus been
    nicknamed Jeeves.
    What people hate: You constantly correct their
    grammar and insult their paperbacks.

    What Kind of Elitist Are You?
    brought to you by Quizilla

    That sounds about right.

  • Blog bot roundup

    The variety is amazing: here’s a list of various agents, spiders and bots that I’ve culled from my chuggnutt.com logfiles over the last 30 days that have to do with RSS and/or blogs (specifically blogs, not just general purpose spiders like Google’s). These are only the ones I know for sure are blog or RSS related; others in my logs might be also, but aren’t obvious about it.

    Geek types, note that these strings (with wildcards mostly) can be used as-is when identifying HTTP_USER_AGENT.

    • Bloglines: The web-based feed reader/aggregator
    • kinjabot: The (currently) beta bot for the Kinja weblog directory/guide
    • Feedreader: Windows-based feed reader/aggregator
    • PubSub.com RSS reader: Another searchable, web-based aggregator
    • FeedDemon: Windows-based feed reader/aggregator
    • fastbuzz.com: Fastbuzz News is another web-based aggregator that scans news and blogs
    • ORblogs.com-bot and ORblogs-bot: The crawlers for ORBlogs which compile metadata and RSS for the aggregating site
    • SharpReader: Windows-based feed reader/aggregator
    • Technoratibot: Technorati‘s crawler
    • UniversalFeedParser: Mark Pilgrim‘s liberal feed parser which is used in a variety of RSS software
    • Feedster Crawler: Feedster’s RSS spider
    • BlogBot: I think this is Blogdex‘s crawler, but I’m not totally sure
    • BlogPulse: Yet another blog/RSS crawler and indexer
    • Slower, Friendlier Spiders (BlogShares V1.35): The spider for BlogShares, the fantasy share market for blogs
    • NITLE Blog Spider: The National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education‘s spider for their blog census
    • LocalfeedsPageCrawler
    • NusEyeFeedCrawler

  • Zach Braff’s Blog

    I plucked this item out of the ORBlogs ORpost RSS feed last night (originally via Acid-Cookie), and forgot to blog about it: Zach Braff, from Scrubs, has a blog.

    Pretty cool, but what’s off the hook is that the blog’s only been active for about 2 months, but he’s already getting over 1000 comments per entry. Whoa.

  • Al Fasoldt is at it again

    Al Fasoldt is at it again, this time taking on Wikipedia. Remember him? Last year I blasted him for spreading FUD about web technology (“FUD Alert“), and then apologized this year for being so harsh (“Apology“). Well, now more people have caught on: tonight I read from this article on Boing Boing and this article on Joi Ito that Fasoldt has slammed Wikipedia and then taken the low road when someone called him on it: this article from Techdirt has the skinny:

    Rather than take me up on the experiment, or suggest an alternative, he complained simply that the whole idea of Wikipedia was “outrageous,” “repugnant” and finally (in another email) “dangerous,” and therefore he refused to take part in my experiment. He told me that asking him to take part of an experiment that would show how Wikipedia corrected errors “wouldn’t change the danger” of Wikipedia — and mentioned how important it was that teachers everywhere knew what a dangerous tool this was. After this email exchange, he came to Techdirt himself, and commented that, based on what he read here, he was disappointed in our educational system — and proceeded to misquote a poem.

     

    …by refusing to back up his claims, by mis-stating or ignoring nearly everything I said to him and by resorting to misdirection in his arguments, personally, I find Mr. Fasoldt to be untrustworthy — but I suggest you make your own judgment call on that one.

    Now, I’ll be fair, I read Fasoldt’s original article that kicked this off, and I didn’t find it problematic. A little FUD-ish, but hey, that’s what he does. It could’ve stayed civil and turned into a good future article for him. But all this followup?

    Well, I’m just sayin’.

  • Blue Oregon?

    I keep seeing references to a new Oregon-related group blog called “BlueOregon,” purporting to reside at the domain name www.blueoregon.com. However, every time I try this domain, I get a “Future home of a domain” page—i.e., the domain name has been registered, but it’s parked on a generic landing page. (Even ORBlogs is showing content from it.) Is this a joke? Really bad DNS/proxy/caching/something configuration on BendBroadband’s part? What’s the deal?

  • Farking Irritating

    Going through the chuggnutt.com logfiles for the 6th, I noticed that there were suddenly a bunch of hits to the Oobi image I’d posted here a while back from TotalFark. Basically, someone’s linked directly to the image on this server from a high-traffic site.

    Now on the one hand, that’s kind of cool—but on the other hand, I’m a little irritated because TotalFark is a paid subscription site that I can’t access without registering first, which means I can’t just go and see what they’re doing with the Oobi image they’re pulling from me. Does that seem fair? Their site is saving money by sucking an image down over my bandwidth, and on top of that I’d have to pay them additional money to find out why.

    And before someone points out to me that it’s only like 5 bucks to register and I’m therefore a cheap bastard, well, consider this: FARK‘s Terms of Service at the bottom of every page reads:

    Text comments, audioedit submissions, and photoshopped images posted on Fark by registered users may not be reposted or broadcast without the express written permission or license from Fark.com and must attribute Fark.com as the source.

    So if they won’t let people use their images without their permission, then why should I? It’s the principal of the thing.

    Grumble… It might be time to brush up on some Apache rewrite rules…

  • Friendster goes PHP

    An item I saw yesterday but forgot to blog about: Friendster goes PHP. Pretty cool.

    Finally on Friday we launched a platform rearchitecture based on loose-coupling, web standards, and a move from JSP (via Tomcat) to PHP. The website doesn’t look much different, but hopefully we can now stop being a byword for unacceptably poky site performance.

    I haven’t had much of a chance yet to use Friendster to see if it truly is faster, so I can’t personally comment on that aspect. And predictably, this is going to bring all sorts of people out of the woodwork arguing over the relative merits of Java/JSP (which was old Friendster) versus PHP… just look at the comments on the link above to see it already happening. And while debate and disagreement can be healthy and productive, how about a quick reality check to everyone:

    PHP is good. Java is good. Both have their merits and disadvantages. Loudly complaining that [Java|PHP] is the only true way and the other is crap is boring and uninformed.

  • Oregon Trail Diaries

    Here’s a site containing links to the texts of diaries from the Oregon Trail. Interesting stuff; it would be worth collecting it and turning it into a Palm Reader ebook. (If I can find the time.)

  • Finding Invisible Men

    Totally wacky article on Kuro5hin: Using Quantum Cryptography to Find Invisible Men:

    But is it truly a myth, or do invisible men walk among us? And if an invisible man were to be created, how would we detect him and track his movements?
    …
    Invisible man detection has gone a long way, from the clumsy mob actions of a hundred years ago to the sophisticated mob actions of today. The time has come to step into the 21st century with a quantum solution to a threat you’ll never see coming.