Submitted by johnh on May 22, 2009 - 23:43.

...elapsed since we told people about KildareStreet, and so I'm going to tell you some stuff about how it's been going. Partly because a few people have asked and partly because we're quite keen to get some of the smug out of our systems :)

Traffic

9,000 people have pitched up and looked through the first genuinely-searchable version of the Oireachtas debates. They arrived in slightly more than 12,000 visits and have generated 55,000 page views.

There was an initial peak as a large number (too large to mention everybody here, but you know who you are) of Irish bloggers and Twitter users passed our new site around in the first 48 hours. Then it tailed off quite a lot. Then a fortnight ago Google results started turning up in large numbers for lots of relevant topics and Googlebot is currently retrieving about 3,700 KildareStreet pages every day and taking an average of 0.2 seconds each to do so. Those pages are not counted in the total I just mentioned. Since Google showed up it has added an extra 400% to the Google-less total of the week before.

We currently have a Pagerank of zero. I'm expecting that when it climbs off the floor next month we'll get still more traffic -- though we're already in the top ten for most queries I idly try at the moment.

Oh, and of the top ten search queries, eight are variations on 'KildareStreet.com'. The other two relate to Garda recruitment.

So in the past ten days traffic is now averaging higher than during our initial three-day boost and this week we've been doing an average of 3,000 pages every 24 hours.

And yes, I know it's a truly dismal metric in terms of objectivity, but about a week ago we overtook oireachtas.ie in Alexa's site rankings for Ireland.

Who's looking?

94% of the site's traffic originates in (the Republic of) Ireland.

Eircom's the largest ISP source of traffic, which doesn't surprise us since it's the largest ISP in the country. I'm a little surprised, however, that the number 2 spot was taken on day two by the Houses of the Oireachtas itself, and it's remained there ever since.

Joiners

397 people have signed up for email alerts for either search keywords or named individuals. We're currently sending about 130 email alerts every day. By way of comparison the numbers for TheyWorkForYou (which, to be fair, covers a country with fifteen times more people in it and has been running for about seven years now) are about 70,000 and about 20,000 respectively. The ratio is similar, though...

I'll tell you that several identifiable members of the Dáil and Seanad are among the signers-up. I won't tell you who they are or what they're tracking.

Effects so far

The piece which appeared on May 10th in the Sunday Business Post triggered a flurry of additional press items and got me talking about it on several radio stations. For future web site launchers, I cannot begin to tell you how much more significant the result was when we got two column inches in Metro than it was for anything else. You can see some clippings over here.

In our first week there was no new Oireachtas business.

In the second week they came back to work and the official site was generally being (fully) updated by about 2300 the day after each sitting day, but often containing major errors.

In the third week I got annoyed about this and called them out about the errors on KildareStreet's sideblog.

Since the day after that rant the official site has been finished for the day, on average, without errors and six hours more quickly. If we'd had no effect but that, I'd consider this worthwhile.

Finally

I did not know what would happen after we pushed this thing out of the door. We just knew it needed doing, and that if anybody else was ever going to do it, they would have by now.

In fact KildareStreet has become, in this small pond, a much bigger fish than I ever expected and very much more quickly than anybody anticipated.

I'm out of interesting info for now, and I've got five years of deliberately-ill-formatted TD and Senator expenses to finish parsing, so I'll end here.

Meanwhile: cheers, everybody.

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