User base and server load The PG website is ranked at position 3,842 by Alexa (Dec 31, 2005). Note that Alexa is an Amazon company and thus bookish people are overrepresented in the Alexa user base. While the absolute Alexa rank value is skewed in our favor, the trend Alexa gives is quite objective. Since Jan 1, 2005: - 2.5 times as many people are using PG and - PG is serving 2 times as many web pages. To accomodate the increased load at better response times the site was redesigned for more static pages and better caching. Rarely used features like skins were dropped in favor of better performance. Where do new users come from? Most visitors find us thru search engines. But 10% come from wikipedia. The catalog team has been active in editing appropriate wikipedia articles to point to our ebooks. If you want more people to come to PG, help us editing more wikipedia articles. Dec 2005 Visitors % Referrer URL 236011 24.20% www.google.com/ 97795 10.03% en.wikipedia.org/ 78527 8.05% search.yahoo.com/ 34796 3.57% www.promo.net/ 28997 2.97% www.google.co.uk/ 24810 2.54% www.stumbleupon.com/ 20355 2.09% www.google.ca/ 16598 1.70% search.msn.com/ 15289 1.57% www.google.de/ 13714 1.41% www.google.co.in/ Search Terms Visitors found us searching for these terms: Dec 2005 Visitors Search Term 24923 project gutenberg 18297 gutenberg 9391 gutenberg project 9176 free ebooks 6964 ebooks 4303 e books 4059 free e books 3807 free books 3489 online books 3348 project gutenburg While most of these people knew beforehand what they were looking for, some of them found us by searching for "free ebooks" or similar generic terms. I have rewritten our main page to push our ranking for the "free ebooks" search term. We are also well positioned in google for following generic search terms: Dec 2005 Pos. Search Term 2 free ebooks 2 free books 5 ebooks 15 books Some other sites rank better than PG because they have "ebook" in the domain name. This way all links to those sites must contain the target word "ebook". If you want to help pushing our rank, set links in your web pages pointing to the PG main page with the link text "free ebooks" like this: My favorite <a href="http://www.gutenberg.org">free ebooks</a> site. Pretty Pictures Snapshots of Alexa statistics on Dec 31, 2005: Pageviews: http://www.gutenberg.org/internal/reports/2005/alexa.6yp.png Reach: http://www.gutenberg.org/internal/reports/2005/alexa.6yr.png Rank: http://www.gutenberg.org/internal/reports/2005/alexa.6yt.png User: internal Pass: books -- Marcello Perathoner webmaster@gutenberg.org