Random Images?

Sci-fi, comics, humor, photos…it's all fair game.

March 1st, 2004 by Kelson. Posted in Web Design

Interesting note: I was looking at a subset of the web server logs, and noticed some hits from a program called webcollage. I was already familiar with it as a screen saver module: it reaches out to grab random images off the web and creates a collage on your screen.

What I did not know was that one of its sources is Altavista’s random link feature – and that feature isn’t so random. From what I can tell, AV picks a random site once a minute and sends everyone to the same place.

Whatever the reason, there were lots of times that several different computers grabbed the same page looking for images, and every time the hits were all clustered within a minute.

The big winners seemed to be our Comic Con photos (8 at once), the Chain Lightning Flashes (7 at once), and – not surprisingly – the entire Strange World category (11 at once).