The funny search queries that bring you here

As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, the stats here are now being obtained using Piwik (removing Google Analytics is in the schedule, will be done when I find the time to do it everywhere at once – at worst it will be done at the end of the year at the same time I’ll remove Adsense ads). And this Piwik thing is great indeed. I don’t really have the expertise to do a full comparison with Google Analytics, as I never used the latest to its full potential, but for my use Piwik seems perfect. Its weakest point is reportedly the goal system. Well that’s perfect since I’m not using this anyway. On the other hand, the strong points I see are:

• the list of outlinks – Google Analytics doesn’t seem to have that
• accurate referrers listing – Google Analytics only provides partial URLs without any GET arguments: when traffic came from a forum for instance, Analytics was useless while Piwik points me to the thread and even the thread page
• visits by server time and also by local time (the latest is pretty cool, I’d never thought of it, too) – GA doesn’t have that
• cookie-based stats exclusion: GA only seems to be able to filter by IP. That’s nice when you’re on a static IP of your own, that’s useless if you’re on a dynamic IP, or to a lesser degree on an institutional shared IP with a lot of other people behind it
• and, which brings me back to this post’s subject, search queries (or as they say “keywords” even though that’s most often “key phrases” actually) with a clickable link that points straight to the query in the search engine that sent the visitor.

OK, enough with the comparison, now let’s focus on what made me write this post: the funny queries that bring some people here. Currently the majority of visitors come here either for Flash portable or to decrypt DLC files. Other come for the various other contents. A few come for, well, “special requests” 😀 :

• question number 1: “how do i post somthing on google”. Note that there’s actually a thread on Google Group about that…
• query number 1: “silverlight sniff drm”. Silverlight no sniff anything, if you ask me…
• query number 2: “a list of commands that the computer will follow”. Ah… pretty much any binary? Certainly not sit or go fetch though (eh, maybe if they’re asking that’s a relevant detail).
• query number 3: “set nouveau to run gui fedora12”. Nothing extraordinary about that. But why the heck did this one arrive using MSIE8?
• query number 4: “flash auf firefox portable installieren”. This one is actually standard, I was just impressed to see that Google translates your searches to help you find results in other languages (PCR’s notepad comes up as the second result on Google.de for this one, w00t).
• query number 5: “upgrade fedora 12 to fedora 13 hang”. I agree, Fedora really need to work on their updater. My Fedora 12 to 13 upgrade was screwed up by Battle for Westnoth… for Christ’s sake…
• question number 2: “how can i figure out how long a pcr will run”. Since this question isn’t answered anywhere on this site yet, I’ll confess now that I won’t really run long, probably less than 10 minutes. I can swim for hours but running isn’t really my cup of tea.
• query number 6: “dlc decriptor”. I think I’ve got an encryption terminator somewhere around…
• query number 7: “mediawiki url scheme”. Can you believe I actually made him check out Wiki4Games’s Beneath a Steel Sky page? (did I get you too? ;))
• query number 8: “php automatic upgrade script -pdf”. Was he really afraid there might be so many upgrade script in PDFs that it may render the normal results unbrowsable?
• query number 9: “proftp hide hidden files”. After all the trouble I had to display those files, he wants to hide them……
• query number 10: “9650m gt last stable”. http://www.nvidia.com/Download/Find.aspx?lang=en-us?
• question number 3: “.dlc files what are they”. Encrypted file lists they are. FFS, this one came from UK, it’s not as if they didn’t have a chance to learn English…

I hope you enjoyed this little list. I would do more but it’s pretty time consuming, took me like half an hour to browse barely more than 48h of logs but I think it was worth it 🙂