Milestone: 26 Million Hits

Wow, it's the site's 26 millionth it. As usual, these "hits" aren't a measure of humans visiting pages; that count would be much lower. It's just requests to the website: every time a robot visits some page, the count goes up. If a human views a page that contains a dozen graphics, those graphics cause another dozen hits. So it's not as impressive as it sounds. But it's easy to measure so that's what I measure. We can take a look at the log:

204.185.224.230 - - [01/Oct/2014:15:11:28 -0400] "GET /anecdotal/hunt/teamlist/ HTTP/1.1" 200 17433 "http://www.bing.com/search?q=cool+team+names&a=results&MID=2500&adlt=strict" "Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 7_1_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/537.51.2 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/7.0 Mobile/11D201 Safari/9537.53"

This appears to be a human, not a robot. More specifically, it appears to be an iPhone user at the University of Missouri (on the Missouri Research and Education Network, MOREnet) who used Bing to Google [cool team names] and thus came to visit that list of puzzlehunt team names I collected a while back when I wanted to let folks register teams for online puzzle hunts and wanted an idea of what names were reasonable, lest someone create a team whose name was the text of Atlas Shrugged or something.

That list of team names has been the site's most popular for quite a while now, as you might remember if you've been reading these past "million hit posts". That's quite a while. That page is now the site's 2nd most popular of all time, even though it hasn't been around nearly as long as most. I tried Googling [cool team names] on Google, and that page didn't show up. That page doesn't mention the word "cool". Why does Bing rank that page so highly for this query? Does Microsoft have some cool-o-sensor that somehow lets this nerdly stuff through?

Anyhow, I'm glad that Missourian found the page OK. I hope it was helpful. Welcome to the site, one and all. Thank you for reading.