Decline of the Rabbit

If you’re one of the (very few) people who read my blog regularly, you may recall my previous bemused ramblings about the strange things that bring visitors to my blog. The rabbit at right is the hands-down winner over the past year, bringing a very reliable stream of visitors to my blog every single day, via Google image searches or (to a much lesser extent) Yahoo image searches. It’s a nice picture, but it’s not that nice, and I continue to be very amused by this phenomenon. That photo shows up on the second page of hits for “rabbit” on Google Images — which means that every day there are at least a hundred people somewhere in the world who search Google Images for rabbits, got to the second page of hits, then find and click on my silly little image. Every day! Why on earth do so many people care so much about a photo of a rabbit?

Recently, though, a contender for the “leading referrer” has been creeping up the charts. You can see the page that’s the source of these referrals for yourself here. It’s an automatically translated version of the page where I posted the Danish cartoons that caused such a flap back in February (and the reverberations continue). It looks like Chinese to my eye, but I wouldn’t know Chinese from any other language written with similar characters. I’ve been unable to figure out (from my web server’s logs) where these requests are coming from. If any of my dear readers can read (or even identify) any Asian written languages, I’d really appreciate you taking a gander at that translated page, with two objectives: what language is it, and why would they be translating my cartoon posting? And of course if any other interesting information jumps off the page at you, I’d like to know about that as well!

Meanwhile the rabbit is getting a serious run for his money — the mysterious automatically translated page is running today at about half the hits of the rabbit, which makes it the runaway number two on the hits parade…