Googlejuice

The Vyatta crew has been hunkered down in the San Mateo bunker the past few days watching the web stats ratchet upward. Remeber that old dot-com Superbowl commercial with the e-commerce site designers looking over each other's shoulders as their web site went live, registering first a single order, then a few more, then an eventual torrent of traffic. It's been a bit like that for us the past few days.

One of the advantages of picking a slightly obscure name like "Vyatta" when you create a company is that you have virtually no hits on Google. Before we registered the domain name, the top hits were for a Sanskrit dictionary defining the word. This means that as the company grows, you can use Google as a rough indicator of how effective you're being at getting the message out and growing the community.

Let's put some real numbers around this. Last Friday morning, February 24, searching for "vyatta" on Google yielded 157 hits (which was actually up from the something like 120 we had earlier in the month). I just checked this afternoon and Google is telling me 76,500.

Now for reference, searching for "linux" returns 433,000,000 hits. But 76,500 isn't bad for a single week.