The Great Googling of 2010
Some time in the afternoon on December 23rd I was working on my laptop at my desk, Leanne was sick on the couch, Easton was sleeping, and Hadley was watching "girl TV", which is what she calls any show that she likes, pretty much anything on Treehouse.
My Internet seemed to ground to a halt. I reset the modem, no difference. That rarely works, but it is easy to do. I checked my /var/log/messages to see if something funny was going on in my machine. Boy was there, a stream of "kernel: [DOS Attack/SYN Scan?]" over and over for a large variety of IP addresses. A DDOS? On me? How odd.
I looked more and saw that the syn's were for destination port 80. That is the web server. I thought I'd check the web logs and see what is there. A ridiculous amount of traffic was going to /Europe2002/ often referred from Google indicating their search string was "venice gondolas". Off to Google to verify, and yes, if you search for Venice Gondolas one of the top three images resturned is my pic!
My internet was slow because literally thousands of people were downloading that picture off my server to places all over the world.
I love the picture. I have it blown up poster sized and it is hanging over our bed. It was taken on a film camera, before the age of digital. It isn't even level, but it has certain something to it. It was a very foggy day and the background buildings are kinda fuzzy yet the gondolas are clear. I love the depth in the shot.
It has been on my server since 2002 and I have seen about a hit a day for that page of 30 European pics ever since. I like sharing my travels, but I also like using my internet, which at this point is saturated beyond belief.
I still have the server for Fable Island, so I moved the photo's over there. It has lots and lots of bandwidth and it won't affect my home connection. Whereas my home server could push about 100kbps up to the world, the Fable Island server peaked out at 4.70Mbps.
I quickly added Google Analytics and with the help of Lisa, a Chitika ad on the top. I might as well be making something for all this traffic I was getting. That day there was a few thousand hits, and the next day six thousand more.
And then, as soon as it came, it left. Christmas day was down to 148 hits, and today is hovers around 10, only slightly more than it was generating before.
Google tracked 10,030 hits so far on the page from 91 differnet countries. Curiously only 8 of those hits were from Italy. (India, the US, and Turkey are the top 3)
Interestingly, if you search for Venice Gondolas today, you still get my image, but it is now referenced from a page on mcmaster.ca. Seems they stole my picture, without attribution, and my traffic with it.
I should write them a letter. Perhaps this story will continue.