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FWTLogstat1 Version 2A feature much requested by the users of FWTLogstat1 was the ability to capture the search strings used by people to come to their sites. What is a search string and what is its importance? The significance that search strings have acquired for the webmaster runs parallel to the increasing use of search engines. Back in the old times, the main concern of the webmaster was to make known the URL of his site to the greater number of persons. There where also directories like Yahoo and Dmoz, to which it was obligatory to belong. This kind of site management matched with a state of mind that was proper of older times, where things were built to last forever. When search engines appeared, some people did not understand at first why they were necessary. Those people viewed the Internet as something static. They were unaware of the increasingly dynamic nature of the Internet once it exceeded the academic world where it was born. When the Internet became publicly available, it became more dynamic than had ever been dreamed by its creators. The prominent role that search engines currently have is the consequence of this dynamic nature. Web sites appear and disappear by the thousands every day. The same happens with URLs. Directories cannot be of utility in this context, and correspondingly they have almost vanished. With so many web sites available, it cannot be expected that people restrict themselves to a bunch of sites as it was before. Why to always visit the same old sites when there are so many sites out there? A change of paradigm has occurred: when connected to the Internet, people no longer search for a site, but for a topic. Topics are now the central point of the Internet, and they are where search engines excel. As an Internet user, I am interested in where a topic is covered and not in visiting a certain site. Therefore, the topic becomes a search topic. A search topic is searched using a search string and one or more search engines. People come to your site by introducing a search string in a search engine. As a webmaster, you are interested in knowing which search strings people are using to come to your site. FWTLogstat1 can now help you in knowing those search strings, and not only that, it can also tell you which search engines are sending you more visitors. How can this be done? As it is explained in the “Web Tracking Tutorial”, the Perl script ‘trax.pl’ writes in a log file, ‘trax-log.txt’, information about each time that a page is visited at your website. Part of this information is the referrer, that is, the URL of the page previously visited by the user. In the case of people arrived through a search, the search string is embedded into the referrer. We can extract the search string if we take into account that, in the majority of cases, it is preceded by the strings "p=" or "q=". This is what I have done, adding a little piece of code to ‘trax.pl’. Of course, this method is not infallible. One can miss the case where a search engine uses a combination different from "p=" or "q=". One can also take as a search something that it is not, v. g., the URL of a dynamic page where the parameters are entered using one of these two combinations. For example, there are sites featuring a catalogue of products where the URLs are formed by adding to a generic name the code of the product preceded by "p=". Nonetheless, if you see in your list of search strings that one of them is "110384683567", you can deduce immediately that it is not a valid search string. As I said, this method can cope with the great majority of cases, and those where it fails are of no importance or easily detected. Therefore, I decided to implement it to give you important information that was almost the only thing that was missing in this great program. The only thing you need to do to use version 2 of FWTLogstat1 is to replace the script ‘trax.pl’ in your web server with the new version. After some days (or even hours, if yours is a busy site) of use, you can download the log ‘trax-log.txt’, and open it with FWTLogstat1 version 2. You will see that now the information is arranged in tabs, which are initially empty. The first tab corresponds to the report, which you can view, save, or print. The second tab correspond to the search strings, which appear ordered by number of occurrences, the greatest first. There is a bonus, a third tab, which will display the search engines that sent you visitors, ordered by the number of visitors that each one sent. That is it! Now you can have this important information at no cost. You just have to download FWTLogstat1 version 2, follow the easy instructions to install it, and begin to explore the world of search strings.
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