I found out where Google sucks...

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Written by johnleemk on 6:01:45 am May 1, 2006.

It has a terrible a "what links here" function. I searched Google, MSN and Yahoo! for links to the Wikipedia article on Ketuanan Melayu and to this blog, and guess who came out the worst? Google. Yahoo! was a clear winner, with MSN somewhere in the middle. Yikes.

For Ketuanan Melayu, Google gives you about 10 hits, all of them other Wikipedia articles. Pitiful, even compared to MSN's eight hits. MSN at least has some diversity -- there's one Mandarin forum (any readers care to translate it for us?), a couple of blogs, and a few Wikipedia articles. Still, this is all terribly measly compared to Yahoo!'s astonishing trove, that captures an even more diverse plethora of websites. The downside, of course, is that none of these search engines have that much of a considerable overlap, so you have to use all three if you want the most accurate picture possible with current technology. (And even then, I doubt it's complete.)

I then Googled for links to the forums. Surprisingly, there were no hits. Big thumbs down. MSN dug up various blogs and forums which I have commented at on one time or another, but it's clearly very incomplete. The big winner -- yet again -- was Yahoo!, with almost 50 hits; nearly all of them were links from blogs or forums, but the important point is that Yahoo! gives you the most well-rounded picture of my promotional campaign. Still, none of them are very complete. Quite sad, considering I know there are a lot more links to be found out there. But hey, who else but me has the time to waste on trivial crap like this anyway?

On another note, in the course of my Googling, I turned up this 2001 essay from an MCKK (Malay College Kuala Kangsar, one of the most esteemed Malay boarding schools, for those not in the know) alumnus. I found it quite revelatory, and not just because it's the first reference to ketuanan Melayu predating 2003 that I have found. The quality of the English was a bit surprising as well, but I guess it just goes to show how underexposed to the real Malay intelligentsia I am.

Now, what's really interesting is how the chap doesn't pull any punches. This is one of (if not) the first real no holds barred criticisms of ketuanan Melayu I've seen coming from a Malay. (And one educated in a segregated school, at that.) The most interesting point raised is the astonishing percentage of Malays with education at the tertiary level -- only 14%! I don't know about you, but I honestly expected this figure to be at least two or three times higher, considering how our government goes on and on about the quality of Malaysian higher education. The writer has no qualms about directly comparing this to the Singaporean Malay figure of 25%, and doesn't shrink from equating ketuanan Melayu with Nazism. (Something even I, the 15-year-old dropout, have never done.)

Okay, now that I'm done with that, it's time for the same spiel: I'm not dead, and I haven't forgotten about this site. I'm just exceptionally busy these days. I have an exam coming up in a month and my class load is quite heavier this semester, leaving me almost no time to work on the coding for this site. The design isn't a substantial improvement interface-wise, but at least the colour scheme will be a lot more easier on the eyes.

And so, before I leave you to study for World History, happy May Day!

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Related comments from forum thread "Some statistics (yes, they're interesting)":
johnleemk Infernally Rambling Thoughtless Mind Head Administrator Posts: 948 IP Logged	Posted at 12:47:14 pm Oct 15, 2005 http://www.iroatm.cjb.net/bleh/analog.htm http://www.iroatm.cjb.net/bleh/webalizer.htm (ignore the lack of pictures) What, you're lazy to read them? Fine then. Here are some interesting statistics... In the month of October, the average amount of hits (page loads) a day is 983. Since the month began, there have been a total of 13762 hits. The most common ISP used by our visitors is TM Net, followed by Jaring. (Let's ignore all the bots of search engines, shall we?) People from 19 different countries have visited in October alone, ranging from Canada to Malaysia to the US to Singapore to Oman to Japan to Hungary. The most common sites to refer people to this site since it began were malaysia-today.net, haloscan.com (the comments site for limkitsiang.blogspot.com), jeffooi.com, malaysiakini.com and google.com.my. The top three browsers used to access this site were (in order of most pages accessed) Internet Explorer, Firefox and Opera. The three most popular forum topics were (in reverse order) this, this and this.
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johnleemk Infernally Rambling Thoughtless Mind Head Administrator Posts: 948 IP Logged	Posted at 4:57:55 am Dec 1, 2005 http://www.iroatm.cjb.net/bleh/awstatsnov05.html http://www.iroatm.cjb.net/bleh/webalizer_200511.html In the month of November, the average amount of hits per day was 1101. We had a total of 33040 hits. The most common browsers are now Firefox, IE and Opera (in that order). We had a total of 521 unique visitors. I'm lazy to elaborate on anything else.
johnleemk Infernally Rambling Thoughtless Mind Head Administrator Posts: 948 IP Logged	Posted at 9:38:01 am Mar 5, 2006 Okay, finally updating again. I'm adverse to uploading the stats pages again, so I'll just copy and paste relevant stuff for last month. We got 9212 hits, of which 162 were unique visitors (excluding search engine bots, etc.). Our busiest day by far was 11 Feb 2006, where we got 1351 hits. (I wonder who linked to us, or if all the search engines just started updating their indexes on that day.) For countries, my bean counters seem to have some disagreement. One claims most traffic is coming from Malaysia, with the rest mostly being from search engines, the UK, Singapore, or US education institutions. Some other countries listed by this fellow include South Africa, Japan, Italy, Canada, and India. The other one puts the bulk of traffic as coming from the US and Australia, with Malaysia far behind (ostensibly with 600 hits, as opposed to 2000 each for the US and Australia). This one also lists the same countries I mentioned, but also has the European Union, Switzerland, and the Netherlands. I have some interesting stats on visit duration. Supposedly 47% of all visitors stop reading after 30 seconds at the most, but 8.8% spend more than an hour on the site (I know I can't be that 8.8%). Another 8.3% spent between 30 minutes and an hour on the site. The most popular browser of our visitors is Firefox, with Internet Explorer close behind. Opera is a distant third. Some guy with a Mac out there is using Safari, too. Interestingly, 93% of all visitors directly entered the URL into their browser, or used a bookmark/favorites entry. (This means a lot of people are returning visitors.) 5.5% followed a link from somewhere else (mostly my Blogspot profile, Malaysia Today, my Wikipedia profile, and Vamp's blog. I'm also still getting hits from Malaysiakini, where a letter wrote once linked to here). Of the 1.2% from search engines, the bulk are from Yahoo!, with Google a distant second (Yahoo! has 2/3rds, Google has most of the remainder). Interestingly, there are a couple of hits from AOL France. Strange. Now, what you're all waiting for...the search keywords people used: iroatm 6 14.2 % literature in malaysian schools 3 7.1 % what do u think malays 2 4.7 % method of teaching reading in malaysian schools 1 2.3 % patriotic national song-malaysia 1 2.3 % the qualities of a best malaysian 1 2.3 % social contract between malay and chinese 1 2.3 % what do the malays celebrate? 1 2.3 % why do we teach literature in malaysian school 1 2.3 % history of malaysian schools 1 2.3 % pornografi malaysia 1 2.3 % lee ming keong 1 2.3 % http //iroatm.cjb.net 1 2.3 % statistics reports on malaysian school spm 1 2.3 % http //www.iroatm.cjb.net/index.php 1 2.3 % moral values taught in malaysian schools 1 2.3 % patriotic song at malaysia 1 2.3 % essays for malaysian schools 1 2.3 % school sucks 1 2.3 % malaysian students don t read book 1 2.3 % the reason for students weak in speaking in malaysian students 1 2.3 % malay lazy 1 2.3 % leaving school for moral contributing 1 2.3 % social contract in malaysia 1 2.3 % safety in malaysian schools 1 2.3 % http://www.jeffooi.com/archives/2005/08 1 2.3 % http //www.iroatm.cjb.net/forums/index.php?fid=7 1 2.3 % articles on literature in malaysian schools 1 2.3 % why it is very important for malaysian educational? 1 2.3 % malaysian curriculum change 1 2.3 % parliment speaker speech malaysia 1 2.3 % pornografi of chinese 1 2.3 % lazy malays 1 2.3 % johnleemk 1 2.3 %
johnleemk Infernally Rambling Thoughtless Mind Head Administrator Posts: 948 IP Logged	Posted at 5:57:16 am Feb 2, 2007 A quick summary of the month of January: We had about 6000 visits to the site; the daily average was about 200 visits The busiest hour is 11PM, Malaysian time (GMT+8) The most popular article was The Death of Malaysia, closely followed by this dreary thing about proxies. The next best performer, Pak Lah: To Resign or Not Resign barely had half the pageviews of the proxy article. The three most-used keywords to find this site on search engines were all names of people; the first was "johnleemk", the second was "siti nurhaliza" (I blame this article), and the third was "nur amalina che bakri" (who I only wrote about once, here). About 60% of pageloads came from people who either bookmarked the site or subscribe to one of the feeds; the rest came from either links or search engines.

I found out where Google sucks...

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