MetaFilter's Web server statistics for March 2001

April 3, 2001 12:12 PM

March 2001 stats. The second most popular search term is especially interesting. heh.
posted by mathowie (staff) to MetaFilter-Related at 12:12 PM (18 comments total)

Running that search is rather amusing, though.
posted by hijinx at 12:25 PM on April 3, 2001

My favorite is the people that are referred via the search for "www.metafilter.com." WTF? Why SEARCH for that? Why not just come on over?


posted by norm at 2:13 PM on April 3, 2001

norm, this thread covers the questions you raised.
posted by gluechunk at 2:22 PM on April 3, 2001

Well, I guess so! I ignored that at the time because I figured it was one of those "out of control geek programmer ephemera" threads, but it was really interesting. Thanks. I remember now why I like Mars Saxman.
posted by norm at 2:36 PM on April 3, 2001

I never understood why referer logs give away whatever site the user last visited before yours, even if two sites aren't actually linked.
posted by aaron at 4:03 PM on April 3, 2001

Still no toboggan porn. :(
posted by rodii at 5:37 PM on April 3, 2001

keep the dream alive in your heart rodii. If you build it, they will come.
posted by th3ph17 at 5:44 PM on April 3, 2001

But it's not toboggan season anymore! I'll have to hope for…
posted by rodii at 5:55 PM on April 3, 2001

It strikes me as sad that the 20 searches for 'turrets syndrom' probably weren't performed to find information about the majesty of turrets.
posted by varmint at 6:32 PM on April 3, 2001

I never understood why referer logs give away whatever site the user last visited before yours, even if two sites aren't actually linked.

Actually it only ever gives away the refering page info when the browser is following a link. In this case Mefi is linked to the Google results page which just happens to have search parameters in the URL.
posted by lagado at 8:03 PM on April 3, 2001

Actually it only ever gives away the refering page info when the browser is following a link.

That is not correct. Some browsers (like NS 4 on the Mac if I recall correctly (which I probably don't....it was some browser on the Mac, tho)), will send along whatever page you were visiting before you go to another site as HTTP_REFERER (a behavior that is not supposed to happen). I get all sorts of junk referers in my referer logs....quite a few of them are porn. For whatever reason, people like to visit kottke.org right after getting their porn fix.
posted by jkottke at 10:38 PM on April 3, 2001

Most of the false referrers I get to my site are the most popular pages on the web: the front doors of Excite, Yahoo, Google, MSN, Netscape and, oddly, the Stile Project.
posted by waxpancake at 10:49 PM on April 3, 2001

I've seen it happen on my own machine (IE 5.01/win2k), whatever I was viewing would get passed along as the referrer. My start page at home was google.com, and I noticed that 100s of www.google.com (no search term) referrers showed up in the metafilter stats. This happened because I'd fire up a browser, then click my metafilter bookmark several times a day.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 10:57 PM on April 3, 2001

I'm a little surprised by that. This sounds like pretty shonky behaviour on the part of these browsers.

Out of interest, I just tried Matt's scenario on my copy of IE (although I'm using version 5.5) and ran it through a proxy server.

I didn't see any referer headers when I clicked on the Mefi bookmark. The only time I saw the browser sending a referer was when it was downloading images from the same page or when I followed a link to another page.

Strange.

posted by lagado at 6:12 AM on April 4, 2001

"6836: 0.09%: 146.57.83.17"

I made 6836 requests to MetaFilter just in March? Shit! I wonder if someone's been sneaking into my room and visiting MetaFilter when I'm in class. I'm so embarrassed.
posted by gleemax at 11:08 PM on April 5, 2001

I recall from the very early version of Netscape and also Mosaic when I was experimenting with CGI's, it would send the previous site as the referrer, regardless of whether you followed a link from the page or not. Therefore, I'm always very careful and open a new window to go to a site when I'm looking at porn ;)
posted by gyc at 12:28 AM on April 6, 2001

Oh, crap, gleemax, I never even thought to look for my IP. I'm just barely under you, but that's not counting my home IP. Eeeps.
posted by cCranium at 8:57 AM on April 6, 2001

Heh, I guess somebody's got their browser hacked so that it always sends that (the second-most-popular search query) as the referrer. Probably shocks a lot of admins, around the net.
posted by Potsy at 5:10 PM on April 6, 2001