Statcounter has been throwing up some very curious statistics in the last few days. A large number of individuals are coming to the site and staying on it for perhaps four or five hours, hopping exclusively between recent articles about the Gaza convoy. Strangely, all the users with that profile use Firefox not IE, and if they come via a search engine usually arrive on the site via a Yahoo search not a google search.
Now this is from a significant sample – 500 – and the sample changes in real time, but Firefox has been ahead all the time for the last three days. I have never before seen Firefox even come close to overtake IE among readers of this blog in the five years it has been running – which makes sense if you consider IE has a three times larger market share.
I don’t think I have seen yahoo overtake google before in terms of search engine used to find us either.
All of which leads me to think that for two days we have been targeted by a substantial group of people using standard issue software. We have also been under continual spam attack – there were over 10,000 items of apparently random spam removed yesterday.