I can answer some of these: According to a Information Week survey conducted last November, market shares for search engines are: Google: 45.4% Yahoo: 28.2% Microsoft: 11.7% Time Warner (AOL): 5.4% ASK: 5.8% All Others: 3.9% (See http://www.informationweek.com/research/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=19470005...) These are external searches which means that they were not done on our website using our search engine, which is Google. So there is no correlation between our use of Google and the percentage of queries that came from Google.com. Nor do I think it correlates well with how visible our site is on these search engines -- it is possible that amateurs use Google more than the general population of web users, for example. It costs big dollars to get favorable placement in search engines, and for a specialty area like ours I doubt it would be financially worthwhile to try. Incoming HTML requests include the URL of the desired resource (usually a page, but it can be an image or a script or a document), but also the browser from the which the request was made and the source of the request (called the Referer) if the request came from another web site. At 10:28 AM 5/9/2007, Tom Frenaye wrote:

At 07:52 PM 5/6/2007, you wrote:

...

Some ARRLWeb statistics: For the five months from November 2006 through March 2007 our web site averaged 466,400 unique visitors per month. The top 10 outside web searches (from Google, etc) are ARRL, ARES, Ham Radio, QST, LoTW, Morse Code, ARRL Band Plan, Amateur Radio, DXCC, Hamfests The top 10 searches done on our web site are: Band Plan, Field Day, DXCC, Novice License, ARES, ARISS Katrina, LoTW, Repeaters, Contests, VE. Some of the top pages on the site are: ARRL Letter, News, F&ES, Contests, TIS, W1AW, FCC, Members Only, VEC, Catalog, LoTW, Awards. 95% of all of our outside searches come from Google. 466,400 different users per month is significant and underscores the power and popularity of our website.

Interesting numbers but hard to understand in a vacuum.

-- Tom

Guess these questions are for Harold:

Do we have something showing unique visitors over the last year, or better yet, even longer?

I assume an "outside search" mean that an incoming user has searched for something on a search engine site like Google, Yahoo, AltaVista, and the incoming URL indicates what web site he/she came from - right?

Just because 95% of the incoming searches come from Google doesn't mean it's a good thing. Lots of eggs in one basket. Since I don't think we make any (much?) effort to improve our standing within various search engines, that just says lots of people use Google overall. Does Google have a 95% market share in search engines? If they have less, why don't we see more incoming requests from other search engines?

At one time we had some web statistical information available to the public/members via link off the home page (ARRL Info/ARRL Web Site/Fact and Stats, then ARRL Web Stats) to get to http://www.arrl.org/stats/ The information there hasn't been updated since April 20, 2005. Data from 2000-2001-2002-2003-2004 is available by going through the links.

Do we track anything like the percent of publication sales that come through the web site? Percent of new memberships and renewals?

How does our web traffic compare to QRZ.com or other "competitors" (for advertising)?

-- Tom

===== e-mail: k1ki@arrl.org ARRL New England Division Director http://www.arrl.org/ Tom Frenaye, K1KI, P O Box J, West Suffield CT 06093 Phone: 860-668-5444

Andy Oppel andy@andyoppel.com andy_oppel@alamedanet.net