how to know if people come from search engine?

Entropia

$HTTP_REFER or all the other version $_SERVER[HTTP_REFER] ando so on dosnt grab the URL from which search engine the user is coming

how to do it? lots of tracking program do it so it is posible to do it in someway

any tip ?

thank you

dopp

try $HTTP_REFERER or $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER']

Entropia

didnt works as i wrote 🙂

dopp

Oh, I thought you had onyl used $HTTP_REFER, my bad.

Sry.

tbach2

try HTTP_USER_AGENT

oops, sorry this tells what search engine hit your page... didn't read question well enough 🙁

trooper

If a user has put the address into the address bar then you will not get a value to the $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER']

Be aware of that fact

HTH

superwormy

$_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER']

Sometimes you won't get an HTTP_REFERER variable, because either the users browser doesn't send the header correctly, or they typed the URL into their browser, or they visited it through a shortcut, etc. etc.

Entropia

no at all

in the same page i have my track script and another counter by other service

the other one grab the the search engine refer and mine get as refer the name site

so if i search A from google

on A my script get A as refer
other counter get Google!

no tip?

superwormy

They parse the HTTP_REFERER out to find out which search engine it is.

dopp

a lot of statistics programs parse the server logs just because of the reasons that http_referer is not reliable. If your server keeps logs, you could look at them, but beware, parsing logs moves away from php's strengths and moves towards perl.

superwormy

Correct me if I'm wrong... but why would the server logs have any more information about where people came from than variables given to PHP?

Certiantly they might have more info about who was visiting your site, ie which search engines and how many times... but how could they get any other HTTP_REFERER information even?

dopp

They don't contain more referer things, (I guess this leads a little off topic) but they do log hits by a search engine. For example:

if you searched on google for "super site" and your site was listed among the results, your server would have a log of it because it would see the hits by a search engine on your site.

So, I thin this sort of helps, but probably not as much as I intended it to. 🙂