Some Analysis from 2002
=======================


A "blast from the past" for Sept 2002.  

First published 17/3/2009.

I found a 25MB log file tucked away on a hard drive - 121,000 hits
to the Bondi Beach Home Page in mid September 2002.  The file format
has not changed, it processed right through without a problem.  
The result was approx 2900 visits from humans, 
for a total of approx 12,700 pages and 125,000 hits.

The file covers 17/9/2002 to 27/9/2002.

The first thing that sticks out is the number of pages per visit 
- it was 4.40 in 2002 and is only 1.89 now.  
There has been a long steady decline.  Either people are totally 
impatient these days, or the page is not what they really wanted 
and they don't stay long.  On a more positive note, search engines 
are now better at giving give people the exact page.

The old days of the 1990's - "Welcome to my home page, 
enjoy your visit, please sign my guestbook." have long gone.  

The size of a visit in bytes was 240KB and now it is 132KB.

Operating Systems in 2002
=========================

For September 2002, pre Windows Vista.

Windows XP 16.2% (recently released)
Windows 98 35.4%
Windows 2000 22.1%
Other Windows (mainly Windows 95) 20.1%
Mac 5.4%
Linux 0.7%
Others 0.2%

The breakup between the players has hardly changed.  
The others category is very small.  

137 hits came from something called WebTV 
and none from mobile phones.

The main way of surfing the net was Windows 98, 
more than twice as popular than Windows XP.

Browser Wars in 2002
====================

Internet Explorer 84.2%
Netscape 11.0%
Mozilla 4.0%
Opera 0.5%
Others 0.3%

The Netscape era was already well over.  
Most Netscape users in 2002 were using Netscape 4, 
which I consider a buggy dog compared with Netscape 3. 
The Mozilla stuff at 4.0% is pretty much all IE, not Mosaic or 
anything fancy; I just don't have the time to sort it out properly.
It was pretty much a one horse race back then.

One browser that is worth a mention is AOL.  Their browser is 
a modified version of IE and is not shown separately 
from the IE figures above.  However they had 1.88% market share 
in September 2002 compared with 0.46% in March 2009.  
Back then it was AOL-6 on Windows 98 and AOL-7 on Windows XP, 
these days it's mainly AOL-9 which is a modified IE-7.

The history of AOL and CompuServe (bought by AOL) is available 
in Wikipedia and makes fascinating reading about innovations 
at CompuServe and how they had 3 million customers 
at the peak of the dial-up era.

Search Engine Wars in 2002
==========================

Remember the old days in the 1990's when magazines ran lengthy 
articles on which search engine to use and how they compared.  
Even by 2002 that era was pretty much over.  

Measured over about 1100 searches:-

Google 47.9%
Yahoo 16.1%
Microsoft 17.5%
All others 18.5%

Within the Others category, there is Altavista on 2.6%, 
AOL on 2.2% and LookSmart on 1.6% but all the other 
well known names are under 1.3%.  

Old time favourites like Lycos, Excite and Dogpile are around 1%.  
Many years earlier there had been about six players with 10% each.  
I bet their executives did not anticipate their final market 
share at under 1%.  

About a sixth of the Others category comes from IP addresses 
owned by Google, but again no time to sort it out.

The decline of Microsoft from 2002 until the present time is also 
quite striking.  They have never managed to produce a search engine 
that people liked. Back in 2002 they were more popular than Yahoo, 
now they are less than a third of Yahoo.  I predict oblivion.

These figures refer only to search engines sending people 
to the Bondi Beach Home Page.  I have no figures about Hotmail 
or GoogleGroups or YahooMail although the big players constantly 
boast about their non-search web sites and how they are truly 
big fish in the global pond.

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