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This question, Dozens of earthworms came on my terrace and died there, has, as of this posting, garnered 4,584 views. 4,584 people were attracted by a question about earthworms? Or did the word "dying" bring out ghouls? Or did the bizarreness of the question pique curiousity?

Do we know? Has anyone on this SE or any other SE analyzed what words or phrases attract views? (The results would differ with the SE, of course.)

Do we have a clue as to what the most attention-getting question would be on TGO? Is it possible to get a list of the most-viewed 25 or 50 questions? Of course, older questions have time to get more views, but even so, this would be an interesting list.

PS Don't take this personally, @OddDeer; I upvoted your question, I know how important earthworms are to the environment, but I am still amazed at the response.

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    @Charlie Brumbaugh But how does one get on the hot questions sidebar? Is it number of votes, or does a SE employee pick what tickles her fancy? If the first, the hot questions sidebar just amplifies what was a strong signal to begin with. – ab2 Nov 4 '16 at 20:58
  • @ab2 :D No worries ab2 :) Good question. Oh, and as a site note I think that "Or did the bizarreness of the question pique curiosity?" takes the biscuit. – OddDeer Nov 7 '16 at 8:15
  • Great question. It's not just about what the questions are, but about how to find out for ourselves at any given moment in time. This and Rory Alsop's answer will help us learn more about the site, or even just how to play around in the statistics! – Sue Nov 18 '16 at 4:07
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This query on Data Explorer will give you the answer you need. You can select the top X posts, the date, and which SE site you want.

You'll see, though, that 4500 views is not a high number at all - the top 100 posts all have over 155,000 views!

  • I did the search, but I don't see the earthworm question. The snapping turtle is there, but not the earthworms. Does a question have to be of a certain age before it goes on the list? – ab2 Nov 4 '16 at 23:50
  • I thought the SEDE searches ran on current data, but I could be wrong - if they run on the data dump then it may be delayed. – Rory Alsop♦ Nov 5 '16 at 9:36
  • Checked again (11/09/2016) the earthworms are now there. So there is a time delay. – ab2 Nov 9 '16 at 23:07
  • This is so cool! I don't know anything about programming or queries and I really appreciate you doing this for us! – Sue Nov 18 '16 at 4:05
  • Sue - I have only tried creating very basic searches based on others' work. There are some very useful queries there. – Rory Alsop♦ Nov 18 '16 at 17:07
  • @RoryAlsop the data are dumped to SEDE on Sundays. – nitsua60 Dec 24 '16 at 23:28

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