Greensboro Public Library Internet Usage Statistics

9:00 a.m. July 23 – 9:00 p.m. August 23

 Background Information:

 14,464,736 overall web hits - 100% of web hits for the period in question
 21,515 hits on the porn category - .15% (fifteen hundredths of 1 percent)

Pages 2 & 3 of this documents show screen shots of the report that generated these statistics.

Q- What do these numbers indicate?

A- Out of nearly 14.5 million web hits 21,515 (.15%) were for sites that Cymphonix categorized as
"Pornography"

Q- Does this mean that GPL customers viewed 21,515 pages of pornography?

A- No, it is difficult  to establish how many actual web pages customers may have accessed
successfully.

Q- Why are these statistics difficult to interpret?

A- Individual web pages usually count as multiple or even dozens of web hits.  (for example a site
that we reviewed  counted as about 50 hits)

Any attempt to access a page counts as web hits, EVEN IF THE PAGE NEVER DISPLAYS
SUCCESSFULLY

Since different web pages have different "hit counts" associated with them, it is impossible to
know how many times customers have attempted to access pages from a given category (like
pornography)

 
Q- Why do different web pages have different numbers of web hits associated with them?

A- Because  any toolbars, images, advertisements, directional buttons, etc. that exist on a single
page count as separate hits.  For example, a web page that contains 100 thumbnail images will
actually count as over 100 web hits because each of  the thumbnails count as unique hits.
 

Q- Why would web pages in the category called "pornography" fail to display?

A- The Cymphonix Bandwidth Shaper slows the download of pages in this category so much that
the following often happens (slows to 1Kbps, slower than dial-up)

The page "times out" and never displays

The customer grows weary of waiting for the page to download and moves on to another site or
closes the session

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