As someone who works in the sciences for my day job, I’m fascinated by data and what they can tell me.  Naturally, I love the site-visitor statistics that WordPress supplies (one of these days I will plug this thing into Google Analytics), and I probably spend too much time checking them out on a weekly basis.  I’m particularly fascinated by the country of origin of my visitors.

I find the easiest way to look at the country of origin (or at least the language of the speaker) is to see what Google search engine they used to find me.  Since my site came online  last summer, Google has been the primary way people find my site, and twenty-four different language versions of the Google search engine have been used.  Not unexpectedly, the most common version is the U.S. Google site (45% of all Google referrals).  The U.K. Google is a distant second (16%), and Canada is third (7%).  Several language versions each represent around 2% of my referrals: Australia, Germany, Hong Kong, India, The Philippines, Turkey, and Vietnam.  Rounding out the end of my list are: Austria, France, Greece, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Jordan, Malaysia, The Netherlands, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, South Africa, and Thailand.  WOW! 

I’m particularly surprised by the number of countries representing the Middle East and to a lesser extent tropical Asia (although this area of the world inspires much of my fiction, so maybe that’s not such a surprise).  It really is a small planet when people are finding and reading my website from just about anywhere in the world.  Now I can only hope that they’re also reading my fiction….