h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

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Okay, statistics fans, here are some Fun Facts About Guide Entry Use:

Among the popular searches we get every month are:

The Processes of Death and Decomposition - Seriously? People are morbid.
Name Jokes - Ammunition for the office party.
The Neolithic Revolution - A perennial favourite, must be a school topic.
Weevils in Your Flour? Pests in your Pasta? - Who knew this was such a common issue?
How to be the Perfect Mistress - We really don't want to know what's going on here.
Band on the Run - The jailer man and sailor Sam thank you.
Your Heart and the Sounds It Should and Shouldn't Make - Hypochondriacs of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your doctor's patience.
The Applications of Enzymes in Industry and Medicine - Scientific minds want to know.
Isaac Newton - Our hero.
Farm Animals and their Names - We blame this on increasing urbanisation. What's wrong with 'moo cow'?

What kind of numbers are we talking here?

'The Processes of Death and Decomposition' gets around 2,000, and the lowest one out of all these gets 850, so most of them are around 1,000 views a month. Not shabby.

According to Guru SashaQ, 'People spend about 30 seconds on the pages on average and 95% click through to another page in h2g2.' So these crowd-pleasers lure them in, and the rest of us keep them here.

Please keep in mind: the purpose of Guide Entry writing isn't to win the 'most popular entry' contest. It's to provide as-needed information in an informative, witty, and reader-friendly way. So what if only 150 people read my entry on 'Oh, Susannah' one month? If those 150 people wanted to know that, then I'm satisfied.

So keep writing, and they'll keep reading! Of course, if this list inspires you, Peer Review awaits.

Thanks DG

"What's wrong with 'moo cow'?" What indeed? The Farm Animal Names Entry is a really useful glossary, though, in case 'moo cow' doesn't suffice!

It’s not the numbers that matter, it’s the quality of click, I keep telling myself.

Hello, Statistics Fans:

Other people have baseball, we have Google Analytics.

The exciting news for this month is that one day in the middle of November, a Mysterious Thing happened on the internet.

The_jon_m's Guide Entry about the Black Buck mission in the Falklands was viewed 11,000 times. In one day.

Yes, we're puzzled, too. It only goes to show you that you should keep writing for the Edited Guide. You, too, could be part of an unexplained phenomenon.

Otherwise, we're doing fine, with or without alien readership. As SashaQ put it:

'Google Analytics is looking good and green! - 95,000 users, 428,000 pageviews, and average time spent on site was 1min48.'

Apparently, this is all Good News. So as you were: plenty to see here, but nothing to fling flans over.

Thx and a hat tip,

The Mgmt (and DG)

I'm going to write up some cake recipes. Do our statistics suggest that these might be of interest on the Internet?

Recipes are always popular!

I have a couple dozen cake recipes that use fruit instead of sugar for sweetness. I originated all of them. I'm going to type up the recipes for family gifts, and I'd like to share them here, as well.

I hope this post isn't off-topic.

Hmm, you're tempting me to put a recipe into Peer Review.

Thanks for posting the updated DG

Yes, recipe Entries are welcome in Peer Review indeed - they often get a lot of 'likes' on the Facebook widget in Pliny eg http://h2g2.com/edited_entry/A87820752

* so we can see from the widget that people are reading the Entries

Remember that some recipes are copyright- you can use your own,ones that have been in the family for years, or classics. But recipes by named chefs are copyright.

I wonder if these chefs add random superfluous ingredients the same way map companies add imaginary streets and cul-de-sacs to catch copyright violators?

I'm sure Alice B Toklas did...

I really am happy that this thread has inspired so many new entry ideas. Now let's keep the thread about statistics, perhaps?

Fine

it's statistically likely that I will post original recipes.

Is there any evidence of people being put off by the robot trap? I've misidentified things - eg failing to count a car because I thought it was a van. Maybe I'm a robot!

This is a bit off-topic, sorry, but I've found the Captcha complexity has increased greatly over the last week or so. I used to click on a couple of pages of road signs to get in, now it can be 5 or 6 pages. Are others experiencing this? It would put anyone off visiting.