Tool to see daily view counts on popular pages of MEpedia

Splitting this off into its own thread to not derail a couple other threads.

@Yann04 had the idea to track page views on individual pages of MEpedia to see what is most popular, and thus should probably have priority for being worked on.

So I made a script to scrape the lifetime views of each page at midnight EST every day. And a page to display the data for any range of days:

https://me.comprehensibleinputwiki.com/



The view count is the total views on each page over the range of time selected. And the graph shows the total views on MEpedia for each day. (So a bit higher than you estimated, @Yann04, it's around 60,000 per day.)

 

MEpedia seems to be barely working right now. It was going extremely slow a few minutes ago, like 5 minutes to load a page, and now it's saying "technical difficulties" for me.

 

Yeah it’s been terrible the past few days. I hope whoever is running it is aware.

 

Not sure who to contact other than Jaime, so I sent her a tweet.

 

Great work

 

Views on MEpedia seem to have gone way down the past three days. I wonder why.

Maybe the lower numbers are more normal, and the tracking only started after the start of a temporary upswing, maybe caused by something like the JonVsJonVsME campaign three days before the start of the data.

 

Can the Google algorithm be also responsible, at least in part? They have messed with changing the algorithm in the past year or two a few times and it really badly affected some websites, including mine (even in the past few weeks there was a huge drop in traffic). I don't even look at where my website shows up in the search results now, because it is so very badly ranked now. It used to be the 5th or 6th for the keyword "chronic fatigue syndrome" without any SEO trickery and now it is like the 30th.

Google said they wanted to improve the quality of the search results and downrank pages with too much AI content or not actually useful content (relying too heavily on SEO tricks instead of good content, I guess) but by that definition mine should be still very highly ranked and it's not anymore. Especially that it is the only such website in Hungarian and almost all the others that are ranked higher now are simply the usual clueless articles on CFS from magazines or from websites of similarly clueless doctors and naturopaths, so not actually quality material and also not really in-depth stuff.

So I'm not sure if MePedia has been affected by this too or not but it may be a factor.

 

So for example here is the latest such update of the Google search algorithm, happening just now actually: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-launches-june-2024-spam-update/520281/

They keep saying these updates are against spam, AI, low quality content etc but you can find plenty of people (bloggers) complaining that it affects them badly even with good content.

 

Interesting. It could be. But I just searched a few random things (PEM, David Tuller, Avindra Nath, 2-Day CPET) and MEpedia was always one of the first five results.

 

Could it be people aren’t staying on the website / clicking through as much due to the slowness these past few weeks?

 

Yeah maybe, but seems to be a dramatic drop four days ago (yesterday still low), but it's been slow for longer than that.

 

Could also just be noise. Once we have a couple months of data, a chart with the 7 or 14 day rolling average might be better to judge.

 

It’s getting worse. Hmm. I really wonder. A fivefold decrease from baseline is worrying to me.

 

I thought maybe it would line up with searches on Google for ME/CFS, but it seems to be pretty consistent over the past 90 days.



My guess would still be the Twitter campaign made it popular temporarily.

 

You think? To be fair given the total view count I had roughly estimated a lifetime average of 10k views per day, which seems to be the number we’ve settled at here.

 

I just can't think of anything else. Maybe because it's gotten slower, but it didn't get much slower on the 18th and beyond as far as I know.

I wouldn't think it'd be a constant 10k though, since it probably grew in views over time and wouldn't have 10k/day immediately.

 

PEM, which is most viewed me-pedia page, google search interest past 30 days.

 

The google algorithm is pretty complex. Maybe it caught on to the website often being slow and downgraded it in search rankings. Wouldn’t suprise me.

 

Lots of research into outbreaks over the past week. Top pages:

 

Maybe because that dodgy nz paper by little et al focused a lot on outbreaks.