{"id":131,"date":"2002-09-19T12:33:26","date_gmt":"2002-09-19T16:33:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/wordpress\/fun_with_referer_logs"},"modified":"2002-09-19T12:33:26","modified_gmt":"2002-09-19T16:33:26","slug":"fun_with_referer_logs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/2002\/09\/fun_with_referer_logs.html","title":{"rendered":"Fun With Referer Logs"},"content":{"rendered":"

Well, now. It turns out that Kathy<\/a> has had a website for months now. Silly Kathy — you thought you could hide indefinitely, eh? Your clever subterfuge is no match for the power of my referer logs!<\/p>\n

Ah, referer logs1<\/sup><\/a>. What’s a “referer”, you ask? Well, according to the W3C<\/a>, the Referer is “an optional header field allows the client to specify, for the server’s benefit, the address ( URI ) of the document (or element within the document) from which the URI in the request was obtained…” Hey, you! Wake up and pay attention!<\/b> Where was I? Oh, yes. In short, the referer tells you where your website visitors are coming from. It’s not foolproof, but it works some<\/em> of the time.<\/p>\n

The really neat thing about referer logs is that search engines nowadays list your search terms in the URL or the results page itself. For example, if you search on Google for “Effective Head Noogie Techniques”, the URL:<\/p>\n

http:\/\/www.google.com\/search?q=Effective%20Head%20Noogie%20Techniques<\/a><\/p>\n

represents the results. This means that if you go to the top listing for that particular search (which happens to be “The School of Physical Violence Course Curriculum<\/a>“) the webmaster of that site will see that Google URL in his or her referer logs, and will therefore be able to deduce that you arrived at the site by searching on “Effective Head Noogie Techniques”.<\/p>\n

Okay, everybody clear on this?<\/p>\n

Good. Because I’d like to share some of the more… interesting searches that have brought visitors to this site in the last month. <\/p>\n