The E-Sylum:  Volume 6, Number 53, December 16, 2003, Article 20

A NUMISMATIC INTERNET TURKEY SHOOT

  Roger deWardt Lane submitted the following item, which he
  titles, "Happy Thanksgiving!"

  For the past three years, I have had a Yahoo! Geocities.com
  site for my numismatic related information. Pages for the two
  local clubs; Gold Coast Coin Club, for which I am their
  Treasurer and bourse chair, and Fort Lauderdale Coin Club,
  where I am currently the Vice President.

  Another page promotes my e-book - Brother Can You Spare
  A Dime?  So when I first built the site I posted the several page
  INTRODUCTION from my e-book and titled the page,
  "Introduction".

  Like many "webmasters", I have known that the site provider
  has statistical information on my site, as they like to also know
  the number of hits a particular site is receiving.  It's good for
  their pop-up advertising that supports the free sites.

  Now the story begins, the other day I was looking at some
  of the statistics as I had just posted a new Mutt and Jeff story
  on the Ft. Lauderdale Coin Club page -
  http://www.geocities.com/dewardt/flcc/flcc.html. Much to my surprise,
  my site has received over 2,000 hits since inception.  When you
  consider the specialty of a numismatic site and pretty much only
  word of mouth references, I was greatly pleased, but a little
  inquisitive.  From their summary statistic page, I could see that
  the "Introduction" page was getting all the action, over 800
  hits and a closer look at the statistics showed that between
  6 and 10 people looked at it every day recently.  Why, was
  the question I asked myself?  So, I looked at another statistic,
  known as the KEYWORD used to reach this page.
  Here is what I found:

  Top search word used to find this page 42.71% typed
  "illustrations of a turkey"

  Introduction
   ... Turkey minted coins name lira and 2 piastres. ... The
  illustrations shown are from an earlier catalog published by
  JW.Scott Co., Ltd. 1913. ...

  For you computer non-literate people, there are many
  search engines, two very popular are Yahoo! and MSN.
  To update their search engine database they use a program
  known as a web-crawler. This program looks for prominent
  words and creates a Keyword list for the search engine.
  Sometimes they do not understand the subject matter, like
  numismatics and therefore you get this weird result.

  All during November, when Internet users were looking for
  a picture of a TURKEY for a greeting card or invitation to
  family members, they kept being directed to my site.  I wonder
  if this introduced any new people to the science of numismatics."

  Wayne Homren, Editor

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