"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
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