What Hath Google Wrought?

Within the past few days my website traffic has taken a real jump. It varies from day-to-day, but this spike was double what I normally receive… maybe a little more!

I’ve been pouring over my site logs but until a few hours ago hadn’t been able to figure it out. In fact, I was about to go to the actual raw logs, which record each and every file requested… millions per month… when it began to make sense.

Google images!

You know about Google‘s main page, but there are offshoots as well. One of them categorizes just about all the images on the web.

In my case, somehow a photo I took of Elena Dementieva, playing at the Pilot Pen in New Haven, got onto the bottom of the first page.

That photo, over the past few days, has brought more traffic to my site than my home page!

Traffic is good. The more people who sample parts of the site, the more people will read my little entries.

In the meantime, this mystery is solved.

3 thoughts on “What Hath Google Wrought?”

  1. “One of them categorizes just about all the images on the web.” Hate to disagree with you, but that’s wrong! Google images categorizes a very small amount, and the index is almost 8 Months old! Yikes!

  2. Well, I think we’re both right.

    Yes, not all pictures on the web have descriptive text, so Google has trouble figuring out what they are. Otherwise, I believe it is as thorough as the text indexing.

    The fact that this photo just started getting thousands of hits daily only goes to show the indexing has been updated… probably in the last few days.

  3. “The fact that this photo just started getting thousands of hits daily only goes to show the indexing has been updated… probably in the last few days.”

    Or, Maybe that the Pilot Pen Tournament just recentley occured again? If you do a search on Google Images, “Pilot Pen” your picture is on the second row. That’s pretty neat.

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