I signed up for Google's free Webmaster tools service a couple of
weeks ago. This provides statistics on how people are accessing
LENR-CANR via Google.
(I should sign up for Google Analytics, which is a different product:
<http://www.google.com/analytics/>http://www.google.com/analytics/)
I may need to register "www.lenr-can.org" separately from
"lenr-canr.org." The documentation seems to indicate they are two
sites according to Google. That's annoying.
I do not understand some aspects of the results, or the terminology
used by Google. Google's screen content, documentation and
terminology is usually first rate, but these screens are a little
obscure. Anyway, assuming I understand what this means . . .
In the last 15 days, LENR-CANR links have appeared in 90,500
"impressions" -- that is, in screens displayed by people using
Google. In some cases LENR-CANR on the first screen, and in other
cases on the second or third page, or beyond. These appear to be
round numbers; i.e. ~1,300 people looked for the search term "cold
fusion" in 15 days. I doubt it was exactly 1,300.
For example, the search term "bhabha atomic research centre" has
shown up most often on p. 1 position 2, 3 and 5 and then on the 2nd
and third pages, and the links have been most often to:
/Experiments.htm
/Collections/BARC.htm
Okay, I just did a search for "bhabha atomic research centre" and it
has LENR-CANR on p. 1, #6, in the U.S. default version of Google.
The stats say that "bhabha atomic research centre" has come up in 590
"Impressions." This means 590 people have looked at Google search
results for "bhabha atomic research centre" that included one or more
pages pointing to LENR-CANR. Quoting Google's documentation:
"Impressions: The number of times pages from your site were viewed in
search results."
In 15 days, there have been 2,400 clicks through from Google to
LENR-CANR.org, or 160 per day average. That sounds about right. I
keep track of downloaded documents only. I do not monitor how many
people are looking at HTML screens such as /Collections/BARC.htm. I
find roughly 75 to 100 papers are downloaded per day from Google. So
I guess there are ~60 other links to the HTML screens.
A utility program at my ISP says that 18% of all visits to
LENR-CANR.org come from search engine queries. Google dominates the
search engines, at 86%. So, the Google Webmaster stats cover roughly
15% of all visits. That would be ~1066 visits per day, which is in
the right ballpark. You cannot easily correlate visits to downloads,
because many visits result in more than one download, while other
visits result in no downloads (visits to HTML screens only).
There is another column here labeled CTR: "CTR (clickthrough rate):
The percentage of impressions that resulted in a click to your site."
This is where it gets interesting.
First, note that many hundreds or thousands of search terms are used
to reach a website. There are often 200 to 300 search words per day.
The top 10 usually include "fusion" "lenr" "cold" or "tritium" but
the others are nearly random.
The search phrases (combinations of words) are less random. They are
things you would expect such as "nuclear low energy reactions" and
"deuterium nuclear physics with gamma generation." My utility program
finds ~150 per day from Google, which is in reasonably good
correspondence with the average of ~160 queries per day that Google reports.
The top search term and top search phrase is "LENR" (one word, by itself).
Webmaster tools tells me that in the last 15 days, 720 people went
looking for "LENR" and 140 of them clicked through to a LENR-CANR
screen. In other words, 19% of people who went out searching for
"LENR" clicked through to LENR-CANR.org. That is our most successful
search term. Not surprising.
46 people went looking for "sieverts law" and turned up LENR-CANR
screens, and out of those 46, 12 clicked through to a document,
usually "/acrobat/OrianiRAthephysica.pdf." That's 26% of the people
looking for "sieverts law" but it is only 12 clicks.
I sorted the data by the "Clicks" column, and found some of the most
successful search terms are:
lenr, 140 clicks, 19%
fusao a frio, 36, 9% (mainly /acrobat/StormsEestudodafu.pdf *)
(Japanese) jyoonkakuyuugou, 22, 2% (meaning "cold fusion")
sieverts law, 12 clicks, 26%
cold fusion, 12, 1%
low energy nuclear reactions, 12 clicks, 11%
. . .
fusao a frio without diacritics, 5, 5%
kalte fusion, <10
sonofusion, <10
cr39 <10
. . .
* Storms, E., A Student's Guide to Cold Fusion. 2003, LENR-CANR.org
was translated into Brazilian Portuguese by Sergio Bacchi
And so on. In other words, there are 2,400 clicks during this period,
but the top 10 constitute only 268 clicks, so there is a huge range
of search terms. It is clear from these stats and other analyses that
most of the top "Impressions" and search terms are from people who
are actively looking for cold fusion or some related physics or
chemistry. These are mostly serious, intentional searches, either
directly for cold fusion, or for nuclear physics-related topics.
These searches are seldom serendipitous, where people happen to
stumble upon cold fusion.
There are several queries such as "how to make a calorimeter" which
may not have been a search for cold fusion, but it revealed
/acrobat/StormsEhowtomakea.pdf, which is on-topic. It is on p. 1, #5
in the U.S. default version. The sample text snippet shown on the
Google screen is:
[PDF]
HOW TO MAKE A CHEAP AND
File Format: PDF/Adobe Acrobat - Quick View
by E Storms - Cited by 3 - Related articles
These features make the calorimeter independent of room temperature.
The thermocouples are made of 0.03" diameter Constantan and Iron wire
that are ...
www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/StormsEhowtomakea.pdf - Similar
Not surprisingly, "cold fusion" is the most popular search term. That
is to say, it is at the top of the "Impressions" list. 1,300 people
have looked for it in the last 15 days. The next most popular item is
(Japanese) jyoonkakuyuugou (cold fusion), with 1,000 impressions.
Then there is a bogus search term:
"long island town where the wright brothers experimented" with 1,000
impressions.
Who knows where this came from. A few of the people making this
search (fewer than 10) clicked through to my paper
/acrobat/RothwellJthewrightb.pdf
Following that are predictable terms with 800 to 500 Impressions,
such as LENR, CANR, D2O, "bhabha atomic research centre" and so on.
Many people looking for "cold fusion" may be looking for the
programming language. Anyway, out of the 1,300 who searched for that
during the last 15 days, 12 selected LENR-CANR.org. It is clear from
the text snippets at Google that most of these people were looking
for CF, not the programming language.
When you do a search for "cold fusion" the top 10 are:
Cold Fusion Times (Swartz's journal)
Adobe ColdFusion
Wikipedia article on CF
Wikipedia again
freeenergynews
Infinite Energy
LENR-CANR.org
houseoffusion (Adobe ColdFusion)
physicsworld
coldfusionvideo.com (reviews)
This is not terribly meaningful because, as I said here, people use a
very broad range of search terms to find cold fusion papers. As I
said, most searches appear to be intentional, and most are for
specific information within the field, such as for CR-39.
- Jed
