Latest Stats as at 23/3/2011.
=============================

These figures cover the 15-day period 1/3/2011 to 15/3/2011.

============================= ===============================

Introduction
============

Further minor cases continue where rogue users upset the stats.

The latest exclusions are visitors who simply do not have 
sufficient information in their agent string.  They look like
an early Java-powered mobile phone or like some sort of 
Windows with Internet Explorer but no details worth having.
 

Operating System Market Share
==============================

For the period 1st to 15th March 2011, these percentage figures 
are based on visits, with earlier figures in brackets:-

XP 40.0 (38.9, 39.9, 39.3, 38.2 ,38.2, 41.7, 42.5, 43.1, 43.6)
Windows-7 25.7 (24.8, 23.0, 22.5, 22.0, 22.6, 21.5, 21.2, 19.8) 
Vista 13.4 (13.6, 13.9, 15.5, 15.5, 15.9, 15.9, 16.6, 16.6, 17.0)
Other Windows 1.7 (1.6, 1.8, 1.9, 2.3, 2.0, 2.4, 2.6, 2.7, 2.4)
Mac 10.5 (10.6, 10.7, 10.2, 10.6, 10.4, 10.6, 10.1, 10.7, 10.6)
iPhone etc 5.1 (5.5, 5.4, 5.9, 6.3, 6.4, 4.2, 3.7, 4.1, 3.3, 3.0)
Android 0.8 (earlier share included below in Other Mobiles) 
Other Mobiles 2.3 (4.1, 4.4, 4.1, 4.2, 3.7, 2.7, 2.4, 2.2, 2.4)
Linux 0.6 (0.8, 0.9, 0.7, 0.8, 0.9, 1.0, 0.8, 0.9, 0.8, 0.9, 1.1) 

Windows-7 increases at 1% per month whilst Vista declines slowly.  

The "iPhone" result includes both iPads and iPods. There were 
221 iPad and 128 iPod visits, compared with 741 iPhone visits.  

The Android visits were 167, ahead of the Blackberry on 133 
visits and Nokia/Symbian on 128.  Above, the Android has now been 
given its own row, since it is now ahead of desktop Linux.  

In addition, people claiming Java as their operating system have 
been totally excluded.  I used to give these callers the benefit 
of the doubt by thinking they were varieties of mobile phones but 
I have now decided they are just rubbish.  As a consequence, the
"Others" category above has dropped substantially, giving the 
unintended impression that XP has had a revival. 

The total sample size was 21376 visits by humans.


Browser Breakup
===============

Percentages of visits for the period 1st to 15th March 2011:-

IE 49.5 (48.3, 48.0, 47.2, 48.9, 45.2, 52.1, 51.7, 54.4, 54.3)
FF 20.6 (20.9, 22.4, 22.2, 21.1, 24.2, 22.2, 23.2, 20.6, 21.5)  
Safari 14.5 (14.6, 13.4, 14.2, 15.1, 14.7, 12.6, 12.3, 12.9, 12.0)
Chrome 11.5 (11.5, 10.5, 11.7, 10.5, 10.3, 9.5, 9.0, 8.8, 8.9)
Opera 2.2 (2.3, 2.7, 2.1, 1.7, 2.0, 1.7, 2.0, 1.8, 1.8, 1.7, 1.7)
All Others 1.7 (2.3, 3.0, 2.6, 2.6, 3.5, 2.1, 1.8, 1.4, 1.5, 1.5)
  
The sample size was 21952 visits by humans. Safari includes iPhones.

 
Search Engines Share
==================== 

Percentage breakup of visits coming via search engines 
for March 1st to 15th, 2011:-

Google 91.4 (90.6, 89.7, 89.9, 89.8, 89.9, 89.1, 90.7, 91.0)
Bing 3.5 (3.2, 4.0, 4.3, 3.3, 3.2, 4.0, 3.8, 4.2, 2.9, 2.9, 3.2)
Yahoo 2.7 (3.2, 3.4, 3.4, 3.6, 4.1, 4.0, 3.1, 3.0, 3.3, 3.2, 3.3)
All others 2.4 (2.8, 2.9, 2.5, 3.3, 2.8, 2.9, 2.4, 4.1, 3.7, 3.3)

Further improvements have been made in the correct counting of 
searches but the results are only slightly different.

It's the lowest figure ever recorded for Yahoo, a dismal
result compared with my first measurement of 7.5% in July 2008.

Any articles saying how good Bing and/or Yahoo are should 
be studied closely as examples of propaganda.
  
However, Time Magazine (March 14th, 2011) had a brief but 
interesting one-page article on the Google Algorithm.   
Essentially Google tests 6000 possible changes to its algorithm
annually, but only implements 500 changes.

Google has just downgraded the ratings of all those spammy sites 
that are just links to other people's content.  Naturally Google
won't discuss this much, but a lot of American companies with no 
real content on their web sites have just had their hits 
and their revenue slashed.  

Mind you, it's just as bad here with endless sites offering lists 
of hotels, clubs, restaurants, events and music but with little 
useful content, lots of flashing adverts and basically they are 
all far too annoying to bother navigating past a single page.

The Time Magazine article mentioned three other search engines 
which I then tested.  Blekko works quite well and so does DuckDuckGo 
but Topsy only indexes links found on Twitter which tells you what's 
popular right now, but none of my pages seemed to be there.  Knowledge 
about Australia extends about as far as "Kylie comes from Australia 
and so does Nicole Kidman".
   
The sample size above was 15039 searches.

================================ ================================