"Thomas Dalton" wrote
Short answer: it's a good indicator of trend.
It's a good indicator of trend within a small subset of internet users. How do you know they are representative of everyone? I doubt they are.
You can't _know_. You can look at it daily for a while, and decide it tells you things in real time that are apparent afterwards.
Go to http://alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?url=en.wikipedia.org, try 5y, Page Views, maximum smoothing. I think if you knew where to look for it you could see the bot articles based on US census data; a year ago it was more prominent. You can see the post-Siegenthaler boom very well. Apart from the trend growth, the other main feature was December 2006, and a big slowdown.
Charles
----------------------------------------- Email sent from www.ntlworld.com Virus-checked using McAfee(R) Software Visit www.ntlworld.com/security for more information