Google Hits One Billion Unique Visits In a Month 126
BogenDorpher writes "According to statistics from ComScore, for the first time ever, a website drew one billion visitors worldwide in just one month. Guess what website came out on top? Google of course. Microsoft and Facebook rounded out the top three. From the article: 'Though Google captured the most visitors last month, users collectively spent the most time at Facebook--250 billion minutes in May, compared with 200 billion minutes at Google and 204 billion at Microsoft."
Re:That's a billion people (Score:2, Interesting)
I worked in the field, and "unique" doesn't mean what normal people think it means. As on the net, you can't really identify if it's the same person. All you can tell, is if it's the same IP or the same cookie.
As you can imagine, that can be way different from unique people.
Plus, most companies keep this a big secret, but they also count their own employees' visits.
Some even run bots ramping up requests from their employees' home computers by the thousands, to boost their parts of the site in the weekly meeting's presentation. Often for the sake of job safety.
I've seen it more than once, and nobody seemed to mind. We never told our visitor counting service provider.
And to break the camel's back, they also forget about old visitors after a time. At which point they are counted again.
Somebody could easily just have a new log file every week, but count visitors over the month. At which point nobody checks for duplicates in the week files.