Flickr Stats

I suppose I get about on average 60 hits a day on flickr. By far my most popular photographs are my Royal Marine set. They alone account for literally thousands of my page views and are probably the reason I can take such rubbish photos and still get so many daily visitors. Imagine how many would visit if I was any good?

Anyway, I was just browsing through my referrers the other day and it made me laugh. I've about twice as many refers from yahoo image search, which is perhaps not surprising given the owner of flickr. And given my stream, the top 4 hits are unsurprisingly "royal marines", "royal marines commando", "royal marine commando" and "kittens". Then a little down the list I get "crazy person", "basket of kittens" and "crazy maniac".

Why anyone would think I had any pictures of crazy people I don't know. I don't even know anyone crazy. Well other than myself. But I am intrigued by what a "basket of kittens" would be, and why so many people are interested in seeing one.

I'm also intrigued by the person looking for "cow that eats grass". More interesting I thought would be a "cow that doesn't eat grass". Perhaps one addicted to ice cream. Or even a cow that ate people! That would be crazy.

Down at 101 is "burger flipping" which is co-incidentally probably what I would end up doing if I tried to take photography seriously. If I did end up working in the food industry though I'd like to meet "kind cookies", I so hate the rude and selfish ones.

Just over half as popular is the google image search. This actually makes me wonder about the relative popularity of search engines actually. Do I get twice the hits from yahoo because twice as many people use yahoo to search for images? Is it purely because yahoo own flickr? Or do I take more yahoo-ee images. You know, the sort images that people who use Yahoo prefer and I'm being shunned by the more sophisticated google audience. Where do the most sophisticated people do searches for images. Other than flickr itself, I actually prefer live.com for image searches because I like the AJAX funkyness and you can't just keep scrolling down the page and don't have to click next. But I have no referrers from Live.

Again top of my google searches are "royal marines officer" and "40 commando". Over half the first 50 refers relate to the Royal Marines, or 40 Commando in some way. And ironically amongst the google results are a number of "site:flickr.com" searches. Do people really find it easier to search flickr via google?

There are less bizarre searches coming from google. The only one that really jumps out is "marines in sing", whatever that means. I thought ""joe townsend" +legs" was almost bad taste though.

I don't know how "guava+thai" found anything of mine. Nor some strange unicode search which I have no idea what it means, nor even what language it might be in. Probably Korean it looks like.

There were a couple from google.com that made me laugh (i.e. normal search, not image search.) Among them a grockle asking "what does ark at ee mean ?" And someone who wants to see images from "planet fish". I'd like that too! Then there was some odd ones like "site:www.flickr.com 2598186246" (a picture of brent knoll), "site:www.flickr.com 2580973670" (rusting tractors) and "site:www.flickr.com 2577596337" (purple flowers). I don't know if this is indicative of some craze where you can search for random images on flickr, or systematic of something else. I find it hard to believe someone would remember a number and go "Oh where was that really cool picture of brent knoll I saw the other day...hmmmm oh yeah I remember, it was image 2598186246 on flickr."

Sadly there was only one refer from google for someone searching for "Jamie Gordon". And that might well have been me. Or my mum!