Information Research Weblog

I imagine that most readers of Information Research will be aware of the counter on the top page. What they may not know is that I regularly collect information from the counter service on where the hits are coming from. My 'harvest' now totals 4,158 hits - collected since 1 November 2002 - and shows hits arriving at the site from referring sites (almost 500 of them). Only a few sites account for 2.0% or more of the 4,158 and I show them in the table below.

It's a curious list consisting of a variety of organized resource 'directories', like BUBL, together with one other e-journal, a academic site hosted by the Department of Communication at the University of Washington, the search engine, Google, and one item in a newsletter about search engines.

The last of these - Searchday from Search Engine Watch - demonstrated the impact of certain sources: the item was published on 27 May 2003 and it immediately led to a peak in the hits curve, and hits from that page have been arriving ever since, to they effect that it now accounts for 2.5% of all the hits on the top page.

The Directory of Open Access Journals also illustrates how a new site can have an immediate impact on traffic - I don't recall when the hits first appeared, but it was only earlier this year, and it now accounts for almost 3% of the total.

The data on Google are a bit of a cheat - in fact, if one takes all 28 Google sites (from www.google.ae to www.google.sk, the search engine in its different manifestations accounts for 7.55% of the total hits.

Referring site	No. of hits	%
www.com.washington.edu/rccs/links.asp	83	2.00
www.doaj.org/links/term1870/term1940/	123	2.96
www.libdex.com/journals.html	125	3.01
www.shef.ac.uk/uni/academic/I-M/is/publications/index.html	157	3.78
bubl.ac.uk/journals/	200	4.81
libres.curtin.edu.au/periodicals.htm	91	2.19
www.searchenginewatch.com/searchday/article.php/2204961	104	2.50
www.google.com/search?	194	4.67
Total hits analysed 4158		25.90