I thought I might share about the fun it is to receive the reports of the traffic at Seguin.Net, which reflect wide interest in Seguin.

The site is receiving international visits from countries such as Italy, Japan, France, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, Sweden, Mexico, Germany and Austria. People in far away places are visiting http://www.seguin.net  and http://www.seguin.net/heritage/gesicktree/.

Visitors from within Texas and all over the United States, are using corporate servers such as IBM and Motorola, commercial servers such as AOL or Southwestern Bell, educational servers such as A&M, UT or Baylor University, and military servers such as United States Air Force. This is just a very small sample. The variety is amazing.

It is interesting to observe in the reports, that there are days when in the middle of the night, after midnight, someone has been reading John Gesick's book "Under a Live Oak Tree" A History of Seguin. Most of the visits to the home page of www.seguin.net and to the home page of the book at www.seguin.net/heritage/gesicktree are between 7 am and 9 pm. Visits between midnight and the early hours of the morning are oftentimes from overseas, or from corporate servers!

It is also interesting to receive the reports of the browsers used. There is no consistency. Some days, there are more people using Netscape, other days, Internet Explorer. Others are using Web TV, and the AOL browser as well. As for the operating system, most visitors are using Windows 98, there are fewer people using Windows NT and Windows 95.

To me, it seems wonderful to be able to know the location of origin of the Internet service providers people are using as they pay a visit to seguin.net and to the book. I can tell there is a lot of interest in Seguin, from far and from near.

I thought I would also share about another source of interesting information, the reports of the search engine at seguin.net. If you consider that in the 294 web pages indexed there are 304,360 words it is a marvel that the search engine can actually find "a needle in a haystack" so to speak. The seguin.net site includes the book Under the Live Oak Tree and the Internet Beat articles since 1996, in addition to city guide information.

The search engine reports for seguin.net open my eyes constantly as to the kind of information visitors are looking for. The reports show that although most people are finding what they need, others are not. The unsuccessful searches provide me with the challenge to find out the information and provide it for the next person that might need it.

The reports of the search engine at the book Under the Live Oak Tree show that the majority of the people are finding the information they are searching for.

For those who perhaps have used the search engine at the site without positive results, may I explain that the search engine looks for the word that matches the search word either exactly or as closely as possible, as there are 23,400 sound-alike words indexed, which is less than 10% of the total 304,360 indexed words.

The search is not contextual, it is textual. For example, if in the text of the web site there is a word spelled differently than the way you are spelling it in your search, the search engine will not find it, even though the information is available. However, browsing the web site for context, you will find the information.

For reference questions, there is an e-mail link to webmaster@seguin.lib.tx.us . Mr. Mark Gretchen, Director of the Seguin Public Library generously offered his assistance to individuals searching for information.

Seguin.Net is a non commercial web site that has hyperlinks to sites which offer constantly updated information, such as the Gazette, KWED, and the SWB phone book, and to numerous other web sites pertaining to entities and businesses in Seguin and Guadalupe County.

A recent cyber Seguin visitor from France will soon actually visit Seguin in a work related trip, and will be using a computer at the Library for Internet access..... International cyber visitors can turn out to be tangible actual visitors to Seguin, and users of our Seguin Public Library!

Going back to the traffic reports, let me express that it was a big surprise to see a day with 91 hits! Can you believe there is that much interest in Seguin out there? The Internet is a wonderful tool to promote Seguin, that is for sure.

To contribute to the Internet Beat column, contact me at webmaster@seguin.net .

All previous Internet Beat articles can be accessed from http://www.seguin.net/intbeat.html