SpellingCow Statistics

SpellingCow uses a combination of AWStats, various website metrics, and stats taken from our own spell checking logs to gage various aspects:

• Usage and Web Stats
• Link Stats and other Metrics
• SpellingCow and AWStats
• Checker Stats (takes a minute)

Usage and Web Stats:

SpellingCow is used over 11,000 times per day by 3500+ daily unique users and climbing. There are over 300,000 uses per month by 40,000 unique users.

Checker Stats:
We recently began logging spell check sessions in December 2004. Stats for that month are low since the logging was off-line for a large portion. So December numbers, while already impressive, would be higher.

AWStats:
We also track things with AWStats. However, given the way SpellingCow works via a website page-scraping the SpellingCow site, the number of unique users and visits is not calculated correctly by AWStats. You can see this in the pages/visit which reports far higher than reality. To support the claim of 300,000 uses, simply check the Pages data from AWStats. The file spell-body.tpl is only displayed once per spell check session. We are on pace for well over 300,000 uses in January. Also supporting the claim is the report of 25 pages/visit which is unrealistically high given the content of the site. More visits make the number more realistic.

Link Stats and other Metrics:

• PR5 homepage
• 7 PR5 pages total
• 400+ pages with PR
• 120,000+ Back links in Marketleap Link Popularity (310k+ as of 1/24!)

• 2200+ indexed pages on Google
• 10,000+ Googlebot visits/month - G loves to visit this site ;-)
• 112,316 Alexa ranking

Clearly the site is climbing fast. Rated as a "Player" by Marketleap, which is just under their highest rating of "900lb Gorilla". Here's the back link breakdown as of January 11th, 2005:

AWStats and SpellingCow:

Unfortunately, because of the way SpellingCow works, AWStats does not compute the number of unique visitors and sessions (aka visits) correctly. This is easily explained though.

SpellingCow gets installed on another site (4000+ sites so far). In order for javascript permissions to work correctly, it is the site, not the user, that visits SpellingCow. The site regurgitates back to the user what it sees. So the reason for the low reporting of uniques is because AWStats is only counting the SITES as uniques and doesn't get the actual user data. The user data is sent to SpellingCow and is logged, so we do know and track the actual numbers.

For this reason too, the number of visits (sessions) is reported too low by AWStats. There are many requests coming from different users on the same site. AWStats cannot distinguish between them and therefore sees it all as one visit. That explains why the 25 pages per visit is so unrealistically high for the site.