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 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'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!
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
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.
You mean digg? Hopefully not, but this headline does tell a different story :( . Yet many of us still comment on this topic.
Maybe most people simply don't click the Google Doodle?
Seems strange.
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 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 ..."
