From http://siteanalytics.compete.com/lesswrong.com/
less wrong 38.66% reversed stupidity is not intelligence 7.41% akrasia less wrong 6.35% goodhart's law 4.86% hyperplane perceptro... 4.86%
I wonder if people are hearing the phrase "reversed stupidity is not intelligence" and then coming here, or have already been here and read that article and are trying to find their way back.
That's percentage of all hits-via-google, not new users, right? So it's not surprising that lots of them are "using Google as an address bar." But 16% of people with a google analytics cookie come via google and we'd like to know how many of them are really new users.
As you say, it is not obvious for some search terms whether the users are new.
Incidentally, alexa has wildly different (though less plausible) search terms and numbers.
This is a breakdown of Less Wrong's recent new user traffic, data sourced from the Less Wrong Google Analytics account.
67% StumbleUpon
16% Google
5.4% Reddit
3.6% Hacker News
3% Harry Potter story
0.7% Facebook
0.3% Overcoming Bias
4% "The Long Tail"
The 16% for Google is artificially high because many of those hits are users that are using Google as an address bar by searching for Less Wrong.
So we get an order of magnitude more traffic from Stumble Upon than anywhere else -- sometimes thousands of new users a day. Stumble Upon has been Less Wrong's biggest referrer of new users from the beginning of the site. That was surprising to me and I suspect it is also surprising to you. Some of our very best users, like Alicorn, came from Stumble Upon.
What can you do?
In order to get maximum Stumble power, you can't just stumble LW articles and only LW articles. You need to use Stumble Upon for a minute or two every now and then and vote up or down the random links it gives you. I know, it's annoying, but what are a few dust specks when we are talking about saving the world?
Thanks to Louie for help with this post.