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One of my visitors found my site by searching google.yahoo.com for metal toy chicken that lays eggs. Now I’ve had some funny ones before, but this one takes the cake! So I’ll be adding a new page to my fun section for these crazy searches : )
How do you know what searches led to your site?
It’s a built-in feature of the HTTP protocol that the web uses. Whenever someone clicks a link on one webpage, the second page has access to a variable called HTTTP_REFERER (sic) which holds the address of the page they came from.
Search engines like google work by passing the visitor’s search terms on the address line. If you hold your mouse over this link and look down at your browser’s status bar (or just click the link), you’ll see what I mean.
Also, all web servers keep a log of this information. The log holds the date and time, the visitor’s IP address, the page they requested, where they came from, and what browser they used. So I wrote a script that goes through my log and extracts the referers, and this page shows you the output of that script in real-time. And my stats page shows some more info about my visitors.
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