How much traffic being on a Google doodle gives
stats.grok.se
stats.grok.se
It is hard to see from that screenshot, but on an average day we get 5-20k visitors. The day of the doodle we got 142k and sales/revenue spiked like crazy.
Jorge Luis Borges? 2.0M -- but the day after (perhaps this is a time zone thing?) http://stats.grok.se/en/latest/Jorge_Luis_Borges
Those two were global doodles.
Goethe, who was given a doodle in Germany, received ~113k: http://stats.grok.se/de/201108/Johann_Wolfgang_von_Goethe
I don't have the time to do any more, but if anyone wants to (or can think of a way to automate it), the list of Google Doodles is here: http://www.google.com/logos/index.html
(I was assuming that Wikipedia was the first result for the person's name in these cases. I also only counted en.wikipedia.org for the global doodles.)
EDIT: extra contextual stats from grok.se
I think the stats would have also been better a year ago, I now use the address bar in chrome to do all my searches so I do not see the doodle in it's full glory, I see it in the top left hand corner all small. I don't even look at it any more!
A year ago on Firefox I would have clicked it
I've been using browser's search since Opera (Opera -> Firefox)
I used to have google bookmarked, I clicked on it then did a search
I was too lazy to go to the right and do a search from there. When I got Chrome earlier this year because Firefox was crashing all the time, the search box disappeared and I was left with an address bar and no bookmarks toolbar, so I did not click my google bookmark and do the search. I then realised you could search directly from the address bar.
That's the story and reason I started searching from the address bar!
Love Chrome, never looked back since ditching buggy, unstable Firefox!
In Chrome, you type to search in the URL bar so it can go to Google's search results (and hence, giving them money).
Firefox has two bars: one for search (the one you didn't use altough it was way more straightforward than clicking a bookmark) and the URL bar that works as a "I'm feeling lucky button", to go directly to something you already know (you are not _searching_, you are _finding_) as in "wiki tesla" if you want to go to Nikola Tesla's Wikipedia article.
That's a dealbreaker for me and something I can't get on Chrome because of its limited API.
As I was focusing a lot of work at the time on SEO, when doing a search in Firefox around the start of version 3, it used to do a search on the US google which would show me incorrect results. Therefore I used a bookmark which took me to google.co.uk. Firefox then localised the search but I still used the bookmark.
It's all about habit, I'm in a habit now with Chrome and I don't regret it. I might get back on Firefox on version 306, in about a years time.
after mousing over the URL and clicking "Make default" you're done. the default google search doesn't bother me, but some people prefer the explicit separation of URLs and search queries.
if you want to do a search or an I'm Feeling Lucky query, just go back to those same search options and add single character keywords for them.
Keyword: .
URL: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&source=hp&btnI=I%...
then ". wiki tesla" does what you described without requiring a second input field. if you do more of those types of queries than regular searches, you could make it the default so it doesn't require the leading keyword.
once a few good keyword characters are setup to speed up your common searches like dictionary/wiki article lookups, hn, reddit, etc the lack of a dedicated search field becomes a feature.
I actually only click on ones I don't recognize.
I generally read about the doodle on Mashable before I actually click on the doodle itself
I got over 6000 visits that day. Keep in mind that this was 6000 clicks on the 10th result on the search page. So I believe that the hits for the first two or three results must have been much exponentially higher.
Also interesting is that the blurb on the search result page was truncated before the important information I was looking for could be revealed. I wouldn't have clicked through to the Wikipedia page if the excerpt had ended a few words after "He is credited with discovering ..."
I do have about three years worth of Wikipedia article traffics stored, so I could do long term tracking and some interesting data mining, but I keep getting side tracked into other hobby projects.
Maybe most people simply don't click the Google Doodle?
Seems strange.
Random example: http://stats.grok.se/en/201108/Pierre_de_Fermat
That doodle was from Aug 17 2011 - 2.3M hits
This seems more like something SEO marketers or people with nothing to do would be interested in.
Q1 Does knowing the amount of traffic a Google Doodle gets in any way help someone become a better hacker?
Q2 Does this topic in any way lead to getting better at anything?
Or has Hacker News turned into some tech version of LOLCatz?
hacking is not about getting better at something - it's a state of mind
You mean digg? Hopefully not, but this headline does tell a different story :( . Yet many of us still comment on this topic.
It still isn't the kind of thing I personally am hoping to get at Hacker News.
It seems to me that more and more people are interested in shortcuts to success and praying to the Tech Religions than actually doing something themselves or sharing stuff that is really worthwhile.