WWW.AU

Usage statistics ...

The WWW.AU index of Australian web sites received over 21,000 "hits" in the four week period between mid-February and mid-March 1995. A hit is a request for information which can be either one HTML file, one picture, or one call on a program such as search.cgi. This rate of use of the index translates to about 750 hits per day, or one every two minutes. This is almost twice as frequent as the same statistic measured two months earlier.

Surprisingly, the daily usage is not even, with a peak occurring on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. No explanation for this observation is at hand. There was also a peak usage during the first week of January, possibly related to the holiday season, when the number of hits approached 1,000 per day.

Number of users ...

Over any one month period, there are at least 2,000 different users of the WWW.AU index. Actually, it is difficult to measure distinct users, but we know that there are at least 2,000 different "hosts" (i.e. computers) accessing the index. It is quite likely that some of these hosts, and especially the high usage hosts, represent a number of people availing themselves of the index.

It is quite remarkable that the top twenty hosts are each making over 50 hits per month on the index. Surely at least some of these represent a set of users accessing the Internet via a common host. The top 100 hosts are accessing the WWW.AU at least 25 times each per month. Even the top 1,000 hosts are responsible for at least 6 hits each per month.