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The Story of abmany
Question:Here is a puzzle. The term "abmany" is bringing traffic to my website. Why are people going to my site using the search term "abmany"?
Answer:
The string "abmany" is a value that gets placed in the query string of all se arches on myway.com and mywebsearch.com, which are two URLs for a search engine that rides on the coattails of Yahoo! and Google.
Here is an example of a URI and query string for myway.com. Note that the second key-value pair is SEC=ABMANY. That key-value pair seems to show up in all of the query strings that myway.com generates. Note that what the person actually searched for is in the key searchfor. In this example, the key-value pair is searchfor=TOWN+OF+SOMERSET.
http://mysearch.myway.com/jsp/GGmain.jsp
?PG=SEASUSH&SEC=ABMANY&psa=UWJnjj
MjOt2V4VClLw&ptnrS=DS&st=
kwd&searchfor=TOWN+OF+SOMERSET
Here is an example of a Google URI and query string. Note again the key-value pairs. We see that Google puts the search term in the key q.
In this example, they key-value pair is q=town+of+somerset%2C+NY.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&q=
town+of+somerset%2C+NY
Google's is, of course, different than myway.com's. The string Yahoo!
uses is also different. Yahoo! names its key p.
These URIs are in the Referer (yes, that's how you spell it) when the visitor requests a web page, and the web server writes the URI in the Referer to the web server logs so you can see where your visitors are coming from.
The web statistics software that most people use is incorrectly thinking that the key-value pair SEC=ABMANY in the myway.com query string is part of the search keywords. It is, therefore, recording abmany as a keyword.
Why, you ask, does it pay attention to SEC=ABMANY when it apparently ignores the hl=en key-value pair from Google? It would seem that the myway.com search engine is new enough that the software has not yet been taught to ignore the SEC key. It, therefore, gets recorded in the statistics.
And that is the story of abmany.
