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| Visitors |
| Visitors are based on the unique IP address recorded in the log file each day. It is possible to receive multiple visitors from the same IP address (such as a share connection in an office). |
| Page View |
| Page views are dependent on the number of requests for a web page (ColdFusion, ASP,PHP,CGI) this does not include requests for files such as html, pdf, or images. |
| File Views |
| Files such as pdf's, word docs, excel, html files, and any file that is not recognized under the "Page View" section is recorded here. |
| Search Engine |
This is a program that searches documents for specified keywords and returns a list of the documents where the keywords were found. Although "search engine" is really a general class of programs, the term is often used to specifically describe systems, like Alta Vista and Excite, which enable users to search for documents on the World Wide Web and Usenet news groups.
Typically, a search engine works by sending out a spider to fetch as many documents as possible. Another program, called an indexer, then reads these documents and creates an index based on the words contained in each document. Each search engine uses a proprietary algorithm to create its indices such that they, ideally, only return meaningful results for each query. A visitor coming to the site from a search engine is determined if the "referring site" contained a string that matched a known pattern ("http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=test&btnG=Google+Search).
It is possible for some search engines to change the pattern and therefore not be recorded as a search engine. In That case the system would log the information under the referrals section. |
| Referers |
When visiting a Web page, the referer or referring page is the URL of the previous webpage from which a link was followed.
More generally, a referer is the URL of a previous item which led to this request. The referer for an image, for example, is generally the HTML page on which it is to be displayed. The referer is part of the HTTP request sent by the browser program to the Web server. |
| Bots/Crawlers/Spiders |
These are programs which automatically fetch Web pages. Spiders are used to feed pages to search engines. It's called a spider because it crawls over the Web. Other terms for these programs are Web crawler, Bots, Robots, and Crawlers.
Because most Web pages contain links to other pages, a spider can start almost anywhere. As soon as it sees a link to another page, it goes off and fetches it. Large search engines, like Alta Vista, have many spiders working in parallel. |
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