How are people finding www.azillionmonkeys.com?

Well, lets first start with the search engines. In the month of Oct, 2002 I did an survey of my website logs for the top 4 search engines for a 10 day period. I then repeated the survey in May-Jun, 2003 for a 40 day period. These were the results:

Oct. 2002	June 2003

All I can say is -- give it up guys, google has won.

In the 40 day period in May-Jun 2003, there were 54242 total hits (though many are references from other pages at this site). 14021 of the hits came from search engine results.

Update: With the buzz about Microsoft improving MSN search, I decided to rerun my analysis. I've augmented the statistics to fairly comprehensively detect all search engines that hit my site over a 10 day period, and so have been able to add the "Other" category. Here's the first 10 days of February 2005:

Feb 2005

Ok, so if anything MSN has been losing market share, while Ask Jeeves and AltaVista are making slight comebacks. Google has, of course, lost a bit of marketshare due to my more comprehensive statistics gathering and a definite resurgence by Yahoo!

Update: Just looking at the results one year later:

Feb 2006

Yahoo! has lost its gains, and Google has actually picked up share while MSN slipped slightly. This follows marketing campaigns by both Yahoo! and Microsoft who have claimed that their search engines are objective at least as good as Google's. I think they miss the point.

What are they finding once they get here?

The following are the top 20 hosted pages on this site by number of hits:

/qed/asm.html /qed/sqroot.html /qed/cpujihad.shtml /qed/optimize.html /qed/tech.shtml /qed/gamealgorithms.html /qed/puzzles.html /qed/recess_for_css.html /qed/watfaq.shtml /qed/asmexample.html /qed/programming.html /qed/os.html /windoze/OpenGLvsDirect3D.html /qed/cpuwar.html /qed/accelerator.html /qed/apple.html /qed/index.html /qed/graphics.html /qed/p5opt.html /qed/dos.html

What did they use to browse my site?

Jan 2002 Jul 2002 Jan 2003 Jul 2003 Jan 2004 Jul 2004 Jan 2005 Jul 2005 Internet Explorer 68.80% 71.11% 69.74% 71.67% 69.65% 62.26% 55.44% 49.01% FireFox 3.39% 9.10% 17.32% 25.42% Robots 12.46% 9.47% 7.62% 7.92% 6.18% 7.39% 11.56% 11.36% Mozilla 7.07% 7.06% 9.73% 8.77% 6.61% 6.83% 3.45% 2.95% Opera 3.17% 3.50% 3.39% 3.48% 3.21% 4.23% 3.01% 2.69% Netscape 1.38% 1.55% 1.98% 1.75% 1.52% 2.14% 1.58% 1.11% Safari 1.27% 0.83% 1.23% 1.33% 1.28% 1.74% Konquerer 0.71% 0.83% 0.71% 0.79% 0.69% 1.02% 0.67% 0.52% MyIE2 0.01% 0.30% 0.71% 0.94% 0.93% 0.26% 1.11% Stumble Upon 0.02% 0.15% 0.59% 0.21% 0.06% Other 2.76% 1.45% 1.19% 0.88% 0.60% 2.71% 2.95% 2.94% Unknown 3.66% 5.04% 4.08% 3.18% 5.41% 1.47% 2.47% 1.09% Disclaimer: based on resource hits, not # of users

Its a little difficult to completely identify all the Robots. So there is some significant amount of overlap between the Robots and Unknown categories. It should also be pointed out that some robots disguise themselves as ordinary client browsers (typically Internet Explorer or Mozilla).

It should be realized that there has been a sharp rise in the number of bots hitting here for Jan 2005, because of Microsoft's introduction of the new and improved msnbot (which is borderline abusive -- it hits my site more than any other bot, by a huge margin) and because of some kind of distributed web attack that has been implemented via web bots. But the one thing that should be noted is the drammatic rise of FireFox.