In recent weeks numerous images have been added to one of the websites I host. As a result, that website had climbed in the rankings of various search engines and there now are many more visitors coming to the website via image search portion of various search engines. Information about how those visitors came to visit the website are stored in the url field of the {accesslog} table.

The referrer url text string generally is considerably longer than that from a text search or what might be entered by a human user. Due to the size of the url field [varchar(255)] in the {accesslog} table (in Drupal 6.x), frequently such an url string for image searches are being cut off around the 255th character when saved. An example follows:

http://images.search.yahoo.com/images/view?back=http://images.search.yahoo.com/search/images?p=jaime+pressly&b=881&ni=20&vm=r&xargs=0&pstart=1&fr2=xpl&w=225&h=392&imgurl=lars.toomre.com/sites/lars/files/pict

I think the solution to capturing all of referral information is to expand the size of the url field. With image and video searches likely to continue to increase as Drupal websites include more multi-media content, the complete referral text will be needed to answer a client question about say 'search a on search engine b resulted in display of image c on node/view/page d'?

It appears that I can expand the size of this url column on this particular website. I have not tested this out yet. However, this is an enhancement that probably needs to be incorporated into the general 6.x/7.x/8.x branches of Drupal core. I am not sure how to go about helping with that.

Comments and thoughts are welcome. Cheers!

Comments

Status: Active » Closed (outdated)

Automatically closed because Drupal 6 is no longer supported. If the issue verifiably applies to later versions, please reopen with details and update the version.