Talk:Link transit

I'm not sure if our apache is configured to even log internal clicks. Maybe, maybe not. Anyways I don't currently have any software to report or analyze this information. If you know of GPL or otherwise free tools for digging this information from httpd logs pls post here --Juxo 16:47, 1 Sep 2004 (EEST)

This tends to be expensive software run by ad server companies. But it is certainly in use in all publicly traded search engines like Yahoo and Google, in fact, you can see the "imgurl" they use to track say which queries led to which image lookups.

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I wrote up a basic program to perform this kind of analysis on log files, but I'm not sure why you think it would be useful for either contributors or Bomis. It's certainly not a commonly requested feature. Wouldn't view count data be more useful than link transit data?

Both are useful for the same reasons. And both are not available. "Server load" is a lousy excuse, when Wikimedia could raise all the money it needed for hardware with an independent board.

You say both are useful for the same reasons. What reasons are those? -- Tim Starling 07:13, 4 Sep 2004 (EEST)

A serious encyclopedia or any journal would care which pages were reviewed, and which were reviewed from which others, and how often, and what connections were of interest to readers. It's kind of embarassing to have to say that out loud.

Of course we care about review,

Trolls doubt that very much.

but wouldn't that be better served by popularity data than link transit data?

Restoring the information about page popularity is also quite useful. But more useful is information about paths between, i.e. that the single most popular path was for instance Wikipedia -> GFDL corpus -> sysop vandalism -> Wikimedia -> tabloid journalism -> libel suit -> easy street would demonstrate that people actually had understood the subjects correctly and went to the next most logical page to learn the next most important thing and ended up in the most logical place where most reasonable people would want to go given that starting point, while a path from Zionism -> Robert Kaiser -> Nazipedia -> Anti-Anti-Anti-Anti-Zionism would perhaps indicate a quite confused person who was pretty much being subjected to a pile of propaganda and would come away with a quite different impression of the subject than what a serious editor would want.

What would you do with link transit information? How do you "elaborate" a link? The best use of it I can think of is to pick a small set of related articles, and draw pretty graph pictures. A noble goal, to be sure, but it would require a change to the program below to generate such data efficiently. -- Tim Starling 06:30, 6 Sep 2004 (EEST)

Pictures aren't really the point. What if one were able to simply see the number of times that a link was transited in the past month, as a superscripted number ("exponent") on that link? Then it would just fit in the regular page display. It would give some idea of the typical paths followed through pages.

This matters because I need to know what the output format should be, and I need to have some way to justify using server resources to generate such data.

A map of nodes/pages with the number of link transits on each edge, such edges representing a link, is the obvious display. But that would be huge so one must be able to filter down to a very small number of pages and links that hold them together, typically the most heavily clustered / deeply connected to each other. Xerox PARC did some research on this about twenty years ago.

Anyway, following is the result of a couple of hours of procrastination. -- Tim Starling 11:26, 3 Sep 2004 (EEST)

It looks like C to me and it looks like that the Main() takes standard httpd.log as input. I'll run this on our logs sometime when I have the time. Kinda busy now. --Juxo 13:02, 3 Sep 2004 (EEST)

It's C++. It outputs two sections separated by a double linefeed. The first is an indexed list of URLs. The second has three values on each line: index from, index to and the transit count. The idea is that you would read all this into a relational database with an index on all three columns, then perform whatever analysis you need to perform. -- Tim Starling 07:13, 4 Sep 2004 (EEST)

#include <string>
#include <iostream>
#include <vector>
#include <map>
using namespace std;

#define LINE_BUF_SIZE 1000
#define REPORTING_INTERVAL 10000

int getUrlIndex(char* s);

class char_order
{
public:
	bool operator()(char* s1, char* s2) 
	{
		return strcmp(s1, s2) < 0;
	}
};

typedef map<char*, int, char_order> char_map;

typedef char_map::iterator hash_iterator;
typedef vector<map<int, int> >::iterator vectormap_outer_iterator;
typedef map<int, int>::iterator vectormap_inner_iterator;

vector<map<int, int> > outbound;
vector<char*> urls;
char_map urlHash;

int main(int argc, char** argv) {
	FILE* file;
	if (argc == 1) {
		file = stdin;
	} else if (argc == 2) {
		file = fopen(argv[1], "r");
		if (!file) {
			printf("Can't open file %s\n", argv[1]);
			return 1;
		}
	} else {
		printf("Incorrect argument count\n");
		return 1;
	}

	
	char buffer[LINE_BUF_SIZE];
	int numLines = 0;
	
	while (!feof(file)) {
		numLines = (numLines+1)%REPORTING_INTERVAL;
		if (numLines == 0) {
			fprintf(stderr, ".");
			fflush(stderr);
		}
		if (!fgets(buffer, LINE_BUF_SIZE-1, file)) {
			break;
		}
		
		// Find start of quoted method/URL string
		char* method = strchr(buffer, '"');
		if (!method) {
			continue;
		}
		method++;

		// Find end of method, and start of URL
		char* url = strchr(method, ' ');
		if (!url) {
			continue;
		}
		*url = '\0';
		url++;

		// Find end of URL
		char* referrer = strchr(url, ' ');
		if (!url) {
			continue;
		}
		*referrer = '\0';
		referrer++;
		
		// If URL does not contain "wiki", skip
		if (strstr(url,"/wiki/") == NULL) {
			continue;
		}
		
		// Find start of referrer
		referrer = strstr(referrer, " \"");
		if (!referrer) {
			continue;
		}
		referrer += 2;

		// Find end of referrer
		char* end = strchr(referrer, '"');
		if (!end) {
			continue;
		}
		*end = '\0';
		
		// Obtain indexes
		int from = getUrlIndex(referrer);
		int to = getUrlIndex(url);

		// Add to matrix
		if (outbound.size() < from+1) {
			outbound.resize(from+1);
		}
		outbound[from][to]++;
	}

	// Output URLs
	int numUrls = urls.size();
	for (int i=0; i<numUrls; i++) {
		printf("%d\t%s\n", i, urls[i]);
		delete[] urls[i];
	}
	printf("\n");
	for (int i=0; i<outbound.size(); i++) {
		map<int,int> & row = outbound[i]; 
		for (vectormap_inner_iterator j=row.begin(); j!=row.end(); j++) {
			printf("%d\t%d\t%d\n", i, j->first, j->second);
		}
	}
	return 0;
}


int getUrlIndex(char* s)
{
	int index;
	hash_iterator iter = urlHash.find(s);
	if (iter != urlHash.end()) {
		index = iter->second;
	} else {
		// Copy string to the heap
		int length = strlen(s)+1;
		char* newMem = new char[length];
		memcpy(newMem, s, length);

		// Add to the containers
		urls.push_back(newMem);
		index = urls.size() - 1;
		urlHash[newMem] = index;
	}
	return index;
}