Re: WWW Usage (sample from two hosts)

Tony Sanders (sanders@bsdi.com)
Wed, 25 Aug 1993 23:33:30 -0500


> I fail to see the usefulness of this data. The number of different
> ip addresses accessing servers is very misleading. For
> a good example of why, consider that 1000 users a day use our anonymous
> access acount, yet they only ever have one ip address. The only thing
> that these numbers tell you is how many different computers are being
> used. Why don't you collect the number of hits from each ip address
> and merge them to find out the number of total hits per domain.

The immediate goal is to approximate the total number of WWW "users"
(and while we are at it find out where they are) so we can measure
the growth of the Web. Since we can't measure actual users it seems
that the number of IP addresses is a "good enough" metric for tracking
growth (it's much better than NSF net packet counts anyway).

In the future I would like to add in more stats and automate the whole
process. I posted a proposal about this a while back and only got a couple
of interested people so I figured I would start small. When I get some
free time I'll work on the full proposal some more, suggestions are
welcome.

--sanders