Why is everyone googling?

[Martin S]

When you look at who visited your website, you can also see the referring page - the page which they were on immediately before yours. In the case of Google, you can see the search they were conducting. It's often useful to know what is driving traffic to you.

How did you do that?
Is this some special software?

Martin
in Grenoble

[Caradoc]

How did you do that?
Is this some special software?

Any halfway reasonable web server can log "referrer tags" in the incoming HTTP requests.

[TechBear]

How did you do that?
Is this some special software?

That information is a standard part of the log that a web server keeps. A web log will typically record every request from the site, be it a page, graphic, file, document or whatnot. For each request, the server makes a note of the name of the item, the path of where it tried to find it, the time the request was made, the IP address of the requestor, the type of browser the requestor was using, where the user was at the time the request was made and whether or not the request succeeded.

The raw data is difficult to read, so a special piece of software is used to parse the log and assemble it in various ways. One very common set of data to pull out is, "What are the top 20 ways that people are arriving to my site?" Looking at the log can be very helpful in optimizing your website and promoting it.