So, lets break down the problem. I use RSS feeds a lot to read the news. For the uninitiated, RSS feeds (which stands for Really Simple Syndication), are a nice way to aggregate multiple sources and see changes from said sources in a convenient manner. Basically, I can see the headlines from many locations in one place and read the articles I want. Sounds good, right?
It would be, but most sites have only a single sentence description for the “article” which means you have to load the full site to realize that, more often than not, the article isn’t something you wanted to read, or so horribly written you wish you hadn’t read it. To make matters worse, some even go as far as to insert ads into the RSS feeds. Often the ad is bigger than the article description itself. Guess that means their articles aren’t good enough to bring traffic to their site so they feel they have to make money by inserting ads into their RSS feeds. This is akin to watching a commercial trying to get you to watch a new television show and inserting an ad in the middle of the commercial.
So, I’ve been running Google Analytics on this site for a few months now. It is interesting that about a 1/4 of you are coming to this site directly, another 1/5 are linked here from other sites, and the rest of ya’ll are coming through search engines. More people are finding me through searches than I would have expected.
The search engines was interesting: First is the proportions. Google has the highest with about 95%, then comes yahoo. Rounding up the bottom is 4 searches from aol, and one from altavista (ah, I remember those days). Not one from live, hmm. I would normally attribute this to the very mac nature of my pages (which accounts for the searches on ac3 on the mac), but then I must consider the top searches which land them on my site. For some reason, people are finding me by searches for “female friend”, “girl questions”, and “dating friend”. I am not the top search result for any of those searches (thankfully considering that I am by no means an authority on the subject), but people seems to go far enough down to reach me.