Most Popular Search Engines

∟Year 2008 Reports - Part I

∟Most Popular Search Engines

The most popular search engines based on page referral request counts for 196 days of year 2008.

The following table shows the most popular search engines for 196 days of year 2008, with 2 weeks of log files missing. Data used in this table come from the referral site report generated by Analog 6.0 using log files from herongyang.com.

 views  search engine
------  -------------
 3.23%  http://www.google.com/
 0.71%  http://search.live.com/
 0.70%  http://www.google.co.in/
 0.42%  http://www.google.cn/
 0.41%  http://www.google.co.uk/
 0.29%  http://search.yahoo.com/
 0.28%  http://www.google.ca/
 0.22%  http://www.tutorialized.com/
 0.19%  http://www.google.de/
 0.18%  http://www.google.com.au/
 0.17%  http://images.google.com/
 0.16%  http://www.google.com.sg/
 0.13%  http://www.google.com.hk/
 0.12%  http://www.google.com.my/
 0.11%  http://www.google.fr/
 0.10%  http://tw.search.yahoo.com/
 0.10%  http://www.google.it/
 0.10%  http://www.hotscripts.com/
 0.09%  http://www.google.com.tw/
 0.08%  http://www.google.es/
 0.08%  http://www.google.nl/
 0.08%  http://www.google.com.br/
 0.07%  http://www.google.pl/
 0.07%  http://www.windowslivetranslator.com/
91.91%  (others...)

Comparing to year 2007, www.google.com continues to be the top referring site. It's percentage value increased from 2.84% to 3.23%. This seems to tell me that my Website has a better ranking value in the Google search engine now.

The second top referring site is search.live.com, which was only at the 7th place with a 0.25% in year 2007. This is mainly due to the fact that search.live.com is using a referral URL with a search parameter like "?q=access&form=QBHP" for its indexing engine. Here is an example of the search.live.com indexing URL:

65.55.109.139 - - [21/Jul/2008:21:31:47 -0400]
"GET /jdbc/JDBC-ODBC-Access-Creating-Database.html HTTP/1.0"
200 5450 www.herongyang.com
"http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=access&form=QBHP"
"Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.2; .NET
CLR 1.1.4322)" "-"

Of course, the log file statistics report tool, Analog, counted all search.live.com indexing URLs as referral URLs. I looked the week of 21-Jul-2008 as an example and found a total of 1221 log file lines with search.live.com in the referral field. By reviewing those log file lines, I can see that 773 lines are indexing requests, not real referral requests. search.live.com indexing requests have the following pattern:

Host - IP address range of 65.55.*.*
Referral URL Base - http://search.live.com/results.aspx
Referral URL Query String - q=xxxxxx&form=QBHP
Browser String - Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.2; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)

The images.google.com entry in the referral report is a good sign that my pictures are getting better ranking values by Google.

The last entry www.windowslivetranslator.com is very interesting. Looking at some log files, I see that many visitors were using www.windowslivetranslator.com to translate my tutorial notes to other languages.