While looking into Google Analytics for my blog site, I noticed a huge number of visits to a page on Microsoft Choice Guard. Quite odd for a Delphi developers oriented blog, so I decided to delve into it.
First, the page in question is titled "Microsoft Choice Guard" and covers the technology Microsoft uses to prevent other browsers from possibly becoming the default browser. Even recent Internet Explorer updates prompted me to install this "feature". This page is from April, but in the last month it received 15% of visits of the site, way above any other page (and made me richer by a whopping 2 dollars through AdSense). Looking into Analytics it show this is clearly the top hit from Google searches, which are:
1. microsoft choice guard
2. choice guard
3. delphi windows 7
4. choice guard microsoft
There are a few other related searches, but these account for a large fraction of the entire hits coming from Google. This made me curious, so I did went to Google, entered the term, and found out that the page is ranked 1 in the related Google search:
The apparent reason is that Microsoft is very silent about this feature, and the first direct link to them is the 9th (and is on their answers site). Nice to get the traffic, even if it makes very little good to my business. And very interesting to know how things happen on the web and in search engines. Should improve my ranking, though.