Cipher Mysteries

I mentioned a few days ago that Google Trends showed a huge surge in searches for “voynich” triggered by the xkcd webcomic’s Voynich theory gag. While I guessed that the spike was over 50x baseline, I wondered to myself whether there was a reliable way of accessing accurate hit statistics on Wikipedia pages, because that would be a pretty nice graph to see.

Well… it turns out (thanks to a post today from the Feral Graphing blog) that there is precisely such a thing: Wikirank. This shows that the Wikipedia VMs page got 68631 hits on 5th June 2009, compared to a normal daily average of (say) 1000 or so, so a roughly 68x spike.

OK, it’s not hugely important, but it’s a nice resource to know about.