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More than a year ago, with a Google-reporting tool available to us at the time, we brought you a glimpse of how your searches find the Loper website. Today, thanks to the miracle of millions of tiny scrubbing bubbles …. No, sorry … thanks to the miracle of Webalizer 2.01 we can learn lots more about who views the site, with charts and graphs of techie stuff that only a webmaster could love-and some interesting facts besides. Volume of Traffic Webalyzer, reports Hits, Files, Pages, Visits, Kilobytes (and much, much more). What we want to know is how many times different people find something here that they actually want to view-but it ain't easy to pluck from the large pile of data. For the moment , we're using the reports of visits. For purposes of this discussion, a "Visit" is when an outside IP (don't ask) latches on to something on this site. It can represent one person at one computer briefly viewing one article on the Loper website, or it can represent a group of computers connected for an extended period (up to one-half hour), with lots of people viewing various things. Anyway, we have been registering about 1,900 visits a day, on average, since Webalyzer took charge of watching the door last March. Origin of Traffic The Webalyzer tells us where visitors are coming in from, and of course the overwhelming number (about 83%) come from servers with .com, .net and .org as their top-level domains-through gateway providers like AOL and Yahoo! and MSN. But from there on it gets interesting. Sites identifiable as U.S. Military sources account for about one percent of the monthly traffic-a little less than Canada, each month. The UK is consistently high on the list, ahead of or behind the military. Among non-English speaking countries, Netherlands, Italy, France, Germany and Japan always show up with about a quarter to half a percent of our visitors. Searches Webalyzer shows us the search terms that people typed into Google or Teoma or whatever, that brought them to us. Our regular regulars, it may be assumed, don't 'search' to find the Loper website - they have it bookmarked in some way. A lot of people arrive by clicking a link found elsewhere. And some of the searches that show up in the compilation is just us, poking around in the site for whatever purpose. What you're looking for Speaking plainly to the rest of you, then, we're a little disappointed in you. Over the past three or four months, Loper.org has featured coverage of historic and profound issues. It's what we're about. Great events in politics and society-issues of freedom of expression, religion and economics - look at our topic lines: "USA at War;" "Race for the White House;" "Homeland Security." But what topics dominate the searches? Spencer Tunick, for goodness sake. In our piece last April, the globe-trotting clothing-removal-pursuader was a favorite, and he still is. The naked news is still topical in these reports, if nowhere else. Tattoos--confederate
tattoos, prison tattoos, other tattoos-generate considerable and enduring
interest. Callista Bisek was there for a couple of months, but we don't know why-she married Newt Gingrich in '00. Why did the search term "Albritton Communications" come up repeatedly, but never "Bill Maher?" Albritton put on a show called "Politically Incorrect," and when Maher, the host of the show, actually said something politically incorrect, Albritton panicked and pulled the plug. Stanley Cohen, defender of the barely defensible has remained a searched-for name throughout the period-we're guessing it was his appearance on the Hannity and Colmes TV show that vaulted him into the public consciousness. Hannity screaming, "you don't have a soul, you don't have a soul." Ann Richards is a perennial favorite. The spelling "Saddem" shows up, but not "Saddam," since that is how we spelled it in the piece linked below. Here is the top 25-we've smoothed out the spelling variations-for the past quarter, showing the number of visits and with links to the most relevant page on our website for each. (Dave Sagarin, July 4, 2003)
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