On the navigation bar of my pages, I have a search box for searching all of my pages. It's labeled “Search site:”. The implementation uses Google's Custom Search Engines. Google recently added a statistics page that tells me how many people use the search box each day and what the most popular queries are. Knowing these queries helps me improve the site. I look at the results of each query and determine if I'm missing information that people are looking for.

What are the most popular queries?

  1. myspace.com – 207
  2. www.myspace.com — 203
  3. http://youring.net – 40

Why would people search for these things on my site? I don't know, but I'm pretty sure it's spam! Especially suspicious is the two variants of myspace having almost the same count. It's as if the spam bot ran one search and then the other. Blogspot doesn't make its logs available to users, so I can't easily see what's going on here. Are the queries from the same IP address? What's the user agent? I don't know.

If your blog has been hit by this extremely weird form of spam, and you have server logs that let you investigate, please let me know what you find!

4 comments:

sofeng wrote at Tuesday, February 6, 2007 at 3:34:00 PM PST

Have you tried using http://www.google.com/analytics/? I use it on my blogger blog and it provides a lot of information.

Amit wrote at Tuesday, February 6, 2007 at 3:44:00 PM PST

Yes, but it was very slow compared to StatCounter, so I'm using StatCounter instead. I do want this information, but it's more important to me that my site loads fast. Even StatCounter is a little too slow for me :-(

Anonymous wrote at Wednesday, September 17, 2008 at 5:25:00 AM PDT

Is this a poxy to get past blocked websites or what cause I mean seriously your not a proxy unless you are a unblocker. And whats up with the weird ass starfish

Amit wrote at Wednesday, September 17, 2008 at 8:15:00 AM PDT

Anonymous: you can read about lots of different uses for proxy on the wikipedia page. My proxy projects were for compression, protocol adaptation, prefetching, caching, indexing, and content modification. If you want to get past blocking you need to figure out what's blocking you; my proxies are unlikely to help you.