The fun of referrer-browsing

J

JRPereira

Limp Gawd
Joined
Nov 22, 2004
Messages
455
I have a small stats script I wrote for my site that tracks a few things including referrers. I've found that one of the fun parts of having it is that I can check out other sites that are actively passing visitors to my site, and see what they have to say (not necessarily about my site, but what they're talking about along with the link to my site).

I'm finding a lot of cool blogs, forums, and other sites that are related to my interests just through checking out the referrers. Has anyone had a similar experience?
 
Yeah; it's given me a few interesting "leads" as well. I'm interested in spiders and robots, and I've found a few new ones. Plus, a few cool sites.

What script are you using for log analysis, BTW?
 
I haven't actually gotten into analyzing the apache logs yet. I'm just adding entries to a (my)SQL database.

Yea I know it's a bit messy but I haven't had the time to learn to read directly from the logs.
 
My domain name is thedoh.com and every so often I get hits from MSN on queries: the dog.com

I don't want to know! :eek:
 
doh said:
My domain name is thedoh.com and every so often I get hits from MSN on queries: the dog.com

I don't want to know! :eek:
Click to expand...

You may be seeing some of mine... I taught my web-proxy to make referrers more fun. Most look like search-engine queries - any one of a score of engines and using a word or three from a list of a couple hundred (biased towards the weird and the pornographic, with enough bland pop-culture terms to make for interesting juxtaposition). Others referrers are to pages that I actually have browsed recently, but have nothing to with he current page request.

:)
 
One fun thing I've found from my referrer logs is that I unintentionally host background images for a few dozen Xanga sites. Oh, the havoc I could wreak by swapping in some carefully chosen images... :D
 
HorsePunchKid said:
One fun thing I've found from my referrer logs is that I unintentionally host background images for a few dozen Xanga sites. Oh, the havoc I could wreak by swapping in some carefully chosen images... :D
Click to expand...

Oh man, do it. Some people just need a good kick to make them stop leaching.
 
HorsePunchKid said:
One fun thing I've found from my referrer logs is that I unintentionally host background images for a few dozen Xanga sites. Oh, the havoc I could wreak by swapping in some carefully chosen images... :D
Click to expand...

i would do that in a heartbeat......wanders off to look at logs.
 
My blog gets hits for weird stuff. Mostly search engine queries from different countries - especially Korea, China, etc - so weird.

Probably the worst query yet was "old lady pictures" -- I didn't want to really see that one. Thank god I was on page 25 or so.
 
Lately I've been showing a rash of visitors coming from random gambling websites, which is strange considering I don't even mentiong gambling, gaming, or anything like that on my site.

I also notice people leeching my images, but when I investigate it, I generally find that it is someone I know, so I don't usually bother. I've considered disabling hot linking from sites I don't specifically allow, but then my friends would have to get permission from me before posting something somewhere.

Besides, I'm not using my 300+ gigs of bandwidth, so someone ought to get some use from it. ;)
 
i'd like to know why/how i'm getting referrels from a porn site (cams.com). it's rather perplexing. the site is lamentation.net btw, and is nothing but a layout at this point
 
HorsePunchKid said:
...I unintentionally host background images for a few dozen Xanga sites.
Click to expand...
I guess it's been a while (late July, apparently) since I ran stats on my server. I'm now hosting (or have hosted) images for over 50 Xanga sites, a half a dozen Myspace sites, and a couple of random blogs. Just for fun, here are the top few searches for this year:
Code: 
2394	wolf spider
1391	centipede
1045	leaf
779	blood drops
360	butterflies
354	car wheels
305	slug
261	feather
248	elevator
210	hummingbird
177	bass tracker
176	house centipede
170	pillbug
163	drops of blood
158	picasso blue
158	snow texture

For a few of these, I've got the top match on Google Images, and some (like "wolf spider") come up as an image even when you're not looking for images. The only one I don't really get is "elevator"... :confused:

Back closer to the topic at hand, it's funny how shocked people are when you tell them how much information their browser is sending out whenever they click a link. It's a pity that educating users is completely unproductive. I wonder how long before it becomes standard not to send the referring URL when following a link; I know it would probably break quite a few sites.
 
I wonder how long before it becomes standard not to send the referring URL when following a link; I know it would probably break quite a few sites.
Click to expand...

Until all browsers conform to the same standard, this would cause widespread panic and confusion.
 
I've gotten quite a bit of it over the years. Lots of those specialized "search engines" that are covered in ads do it too. It really skews the stats :mad:
 
I stopped checking referrer sites after a BF1942 video I made spread all over the net. It pissed me off, 50gb of bandwidth gone in about half a day. :mad:
I followed it from where I posted it (www.caleague.com forums) to a geocities website about BF1942. :rolleyes:

The video was nicknamed "Superman" www.exaotus.net/Lith-DivX.avi


Don't bother trying to download it, it's gone! :p
 
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