Latest Stats as at 3/2/2009. These figures cover the 13-day period 16/2/2009 to 28/2/2009. Note: Earlier figures, each spanning half a month are in brackets. The third and fourth earlier figures are the Christmas period (mid December to mid January) and are not as representative as other figures. Vista Market Share ================== For period 16th to 28th February 2009, figures based on visits:- XP 66.2 (was 65.3, 64.1, 64.7, 64.2, 66.2, 66.7, 68.9, 69.9) Vista 21.1 (was, 20.4, 20.9, 22.0, 21.9, 19.6, 19.7, 18.0) Other Windows 3.6 (was 4.3, 4.9, 3.3, 3.9, 4.3, 4.2, 4.7) Mac 6.7 (was 7.8, 7.9, 7.7, 7.3, 7.6, 7.3, 6.6, 6.6, 6.6) Linux 0.9 (was 1.0, 1.0, 1.2, 1.2, 0.9, 1.1, 1.1, 1.2) Others 1.5 (was 1.2, 1.2, 1.1, 1.5, 1.3, 1.1, 0.7, 0.8) These figures exclude the Google Desktop (not to be confused with the Google Toolbar) as it is not a true "visit". It reads the icon of the web page and nothing else. The Linux result excludes a few "heavy hitters". The "Others" category continues to rise, and the iPhone remains a clear market leader within this category. Browser Breakup =============== Visit percentages for the period 16th to 28th February 2009. IE 67.0 (was 67.0, 66.2, 66.0, 63.5, 67,5, 68.7, 69.5, 69.4) FF 24.0 (was 22.8, 24.2, 24.5, 26.2, 23.2, 22.3, 22.4, 22.6) Safari 5.2 (was 5.9, 6.1, 5.8, 5.9, 5.7, 5.6, 5.1, 5.0, 5.0) Chrome 1.3 (was 1.2, 1.1, 1,4, 1.2, 1.1, 0.8, 0.8, 0.8, 0.9) Opera 0.9 (was 1.3, 1.1, 0.9, 1.0, 0.8, 0.9, 0.8, 0.9, 0.9) All Others 1.5 (was 1.8, 1.3, 1.4, 1.6, 1.7, 1.6, 1.3, 1.4) Search Engines Share ==================== Percentage breakup of visits coming via search engines for February 16th to 28th 2009:- Google 85.4 (was 85.8, 85.5, 82.8, 84.3, 85.6, 86.9, 85.8) Yahoo 8.0 (was 7.8, 8.0, 10.1, 9.1, 7.9, 7.6, 7.6, 8.1, 7.5) Microsoft 2.5 (was 2.3, 2.3, 2.6, 3.2, 3.0, 2.7, 3.1, 2.5) All others 4.1 (was 4.2, 4.1, 4.5, 3.3, 3.6, 2.7, 3.4, 3.1) As said repeatedly, the punters prefer Google by a very wide margin. You might say "After Google, Yahoo is the top search engine" or perhaps "After Google and Yahoo, Microsoft is the top search engine" or even "Microsoft is number 3 in search" (Microsoft actually did say this) but it's all just spin doctoring I'm afraid. Hackers Analysis ================ About 0.6% of hits is malicious stuff where people are probing for weaknesses and generally being pests. I have spent quite a bit of effort in the last couple of weeks analysing these people. I have been automatically compiling a list of IP addresses that should be banned, and it was applied on 15th February. All banned IP addresses get a 403 error instead of access to any file. Although it can only deny people making a return visit, the effects of my "deny" file has been most interesting. Firstly I blocked a search engine called Search-Me whose crawler is called Charlotte. It has a track record of asking for files that were removed years ago; where it gets this list of rubbish from, goodness only knows. The results were spectacular - on the 20th Feb Charlotte visited and tried to read the robots.txt every 3 minutes, clocking up 453 "denied" errors in one day. The next day it tried every 10 minutes, the next day every 20 minutes, the next day every half-hour, the next day every hour. Then nothing for three days and I breathed a sigh of relief, but on the 28th February Charlotte was back with a visit every hour. Hits from "Minefield" dropped to nil from the 15th Feb onwards. These hits were coming from several IP addresses, so it's safe to assume either they know each other or it's the same software calling. Hits from browsers with no agent string at all dropped to nil from the 17th Feb. A good result. Hits from various other nasties continue. Only about a quarter are return visits. Clearly many of these return visits are just a few days later, so unless you update the denied list every day or so, you can never win. Nevertheless, although the 404 'file not found' errors continue at 40 to 60 hits per day, it's a pleasure to see 20 to 30 hits per day get the 403 'denied' error. Some Analysis from 2002 ======================= I found a big log file tucked away on a hard drive - 121,000 hits to the Bondi Beach Home Page in September 2002. The file format has not changed, it processed right through without a problem. Some results of this "blast from the past" next time. ============================== ==============================