The October 16th Mystery

One of my favorite parts of Google Analytics is the Intelligence Events.  This tool noticed more than the usual number of anomalies on October 16th.

Screen Shot of Intelligence Events report for October 16th

Initially, I couldn’t figure out what was causing this traffic.  Yale had recently had some big national news: two Nobel prizes, and the inauguration of a new president.  But, neither event had happened on the 16th.  I checked calendar events and other news stories, but nothing came up.

After looking at other reports, I discovered that most of the spike could be explained by an increase in traffic to the Sterling Memorial Library building page.  Now I knew what, but I still didn’t know why.

Finally, I remembered that the Sterling Memorial Library nave had recently been featured as the background image on the main landing page of bing.com.  I checked, and sure enough, that had happened on the 16th.

Mystery solved.

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