I’ve been amusing myself over the Christmas period by writing a bit of code that works out the top ten tune pages visited and searches made recently.
You can see the results on the charts page (and the top 3 are also shown in the quick links panel on the home page and search page).
[For those interested in the technical details, the top ten charts are updated shortly after 6am GMT every day and are based on the previous seven days. They are filtered by users’ IP addresses so that someone repeatedly visiting the same tune page or making the same search will only be counted once (unless their IP address changes). Also robots, such as the googlebot, are excluded from the results.]
Some of the results are unsurprising – for example, on Christmas Eve, three of the top ten tunes were different versions of the tune Christmas Eve.
Also several of the top recent searches are examples on various pages of this website (e.g. searches for “china”, “speed the plough”, “jig”, “6/8”, “slipjig” & “slip jig” are all linked in various pages) – presumably some these are included because curious visitors have clicked on the links.
However, some of the other results are surprising and it will be interesting to see how they change over time.
One unusual result which pops up sometimes is the tune “XVI. Doe you not know” a 16th century song by Thomas Morley – a lovely tune, but not the most obvious choice. I eventually worked out why when I looked at the Google webmaster tools statistics for abcnotation.com which revealed a number of visitors were coming straight to the page after doing a search for xvidoe. This puzzled me until I realised that they were searches made by people looking for something else entirely and who can’t spell video. Truly the web is an intriguing place.
Chris