I've spotted on one of our sites that activity by the Yahoo Slurp robot
is generally resulting in a different host entry per request, hence the
Distinct Hosts figures are being boosted significantly.
After making a few quick checks, robots for Google and other major
search engines seem to result in single host entries per visit (site
indexing run) which is what I thought was a more common behaviour.
I can see there's been mention in other online forums of large activity
by the Slurp robot but couldn't find mention of the host entry issue
within Analog-Help so hopefully this may be useful to others.
A few years ago I used to run separate reports that excluded most of the
main robots (using BROWEXCLUDE entries) but haven't done this for a
while. There I was thinking I was getting more visitors to sites!
Just for the record, here's an extract from my hosts report:
12: lj612202.inktomisearch.com
12: ct501202.inktomisearch.com
10: ct501118.inktomisearch.com
9: ct501122.inktomisearch.com
8: lj611725.inktomisearch.com
8: ct501149.inktomisearch.com
8: ct501012.inktomisearch.com
8: lj611005.inktomisearch.com
P.S. Most of the requests get resolved to host entries beginning with
either 'lj' or 'ct' but I haven't been able to find out whether this
means anything (or better still anything useful).
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