[Summary-Talk] Re: filter search engines out of referrer reports?

[Dale LaFountain <dalela@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Aug 7, 2005, at 5:20 PM, Jason Linhart wrote:

> Ryan Barrett wrote:
>
>> i'm curious about the referrers report. by default, it includes  
>> search
>> engines, which kind of overwhelm the non-search engine referrers. i'd
>> rather use the search-specific reports to look at search engine
>> activity, but i can't find a way to filter search engine requests  
>> out of
>> the referrer report.
>>
>
> Go to the report you want to configure and click on the wrench icon at
> the top of the report. That will take you to the report configuration
> page for that report. The exclude search engines you can add the "No
> Search Engines" filter in the second filter slot.
>
> Good Luck
> Jason
>
> -- 

Hi Jason,

I just tried this feature, and it looks like the domains being
excluded with the "No Search Engines" filter is a little
overzealous.  Some of the domains deleted from the first page of my
list include top level domains that have ISP-related or other traffic
flowing through them besides search traffic:

yahoo.com (already separate from search.yahoo.com, and contains
mostly clicks from yahoo webmail sites)
msn.com (lots of hotmail sites in here)
google.com (gmail, groups)

I noticed an entry in the 2.6b6 release notes that may be related to
this issue: "Improved second level domain detection for msn.com,
distinguishes their search indexing robot from their ISP customers."
Is this change related to the REFERRER tag or the client's browser
identification string?  If the former, then this report may be
considered a potential bug report since I don't see any separation
for msn.com in the Referring Domains report.

I'm using 2.6b6 on OSX cli.

Are there any plans to further subdivide the search engine domains
into search and non-search based traffic?

If you need help coming up with a list of domains, I would be happy
to help out with that part. :)

Thanks,

Dale
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