What you learn from Sitemeter

Sitemeter is that little thing on the bottom that tracks blog hits. If you're cheap, like me, you get the free version that tells you all kinds of neat things (but not as many neat things as the pay version) like how many hits you've had, what pages people are clicking through from, the ISP of visitors, what time zone they're in (shout out to those of you in Cental Europe), etc. For example, it tells me that today I received my 2,100th hit since I got a Sitemeter account a little less than two months ago, right about the time I restarted this here blog.

One of the interesting things is the referral listing. It shows you where people have clicked over from. If you type the URL into the address bar, it just turns up as "unknown". But if you click the link on the sidebar of BHW's site, it shows the URL for his site. It's really not enough information to tell me who any of you are, although I suppose if I was really that interested, I could figure out a few of you. Some of you, like some guy in Atlanta, post really predictable comments, so I already know who you are.

Which leads me to the point of this post. I recently received a visitor who clicked through from a google search, which isn't all that rare. For example, Brian Carlwell's recent commit to Illinois brought a few people to the site who did searches on his name. But tonight, I got a hit from someone who who searched for 'steve physioc angels'. Now this isn't really a big deal. I'd imagine that given enough time in front of a computer, I too would run similar searches which would seem pointless to everyone else. This person had their reasons to search for information on Physioc (I'm giving the benefit of the doubt).

Now I don't know about you, but I when do a google search, I look through the first ten results, maybe the next ten, and on those rare occasions, I'll even click over to page 3. If I don't find what I'm looking for, I alter the search a little bit to see if I can pull up what I seek. But who in the world does a Steve Physioc search and clicks NINE PAGES THROUGH and is still clicking on the result links at that point? I can't imagine doing a search for Physioc and not finding what I needed in, oh, say the first few results, let alone 9 pages worth. Of course, if it's actually Steve Physioc (or members of the Physioc family), I guess that's understandable, and let me just say, Steve, thanks for visiting.

Sitemeter: Sometimes raising more questions than it answers.