Website Statistics

Website Statistics

tfaoi.org

Use of tfaoi.org and tfaoi.com

Ours is a non-profit organization, acquired the contents of the tfaoi.com website in 2003 from a for-profit company. See the Resource Library Overview page for more information. In order to preserve the links and browser "bookmarks" and "favorites" that had accumulated since the 1996 initiation of the tfaoi.com website, we preserved the tfaoi.com domain for continuity. Our hosting firm made the new .org domain reside under the old .com domain to provide desired results.

Rankings

When seeking the ranking of our website, if you enter tfaoi.org you may obtain a slightly lesser ranking than when entering tfaoi.com. "Advanced searches" using search engines operate under the same hierarchical principle. When you search under the tfaoi.com domain in Google you will retrieve many relevant pages. When you conduct the identical search with the tfaoi.org domain you will retrieve a different number of pages.

The monthly rankings of our website vary considerably throughout the year in a predictable pattern. Monthly variances are strongly influenced by seasonal student research activity at educational institutions worldwide.

Note:

Occasionally people ask how we market ourselves. We:

rely almost exclusively on on word of mouth and incoming links,

have no advertising or public relations budget,

welcome volunteers to provide assistance at our volunteerism page,

may receive inbound traffic from hundreds of thousands of people per month -- many people access our from institutional computers serving multiple people (e.g. shared use terminals at colleges and libraries) rather than personal machines,

know of no way to accurately determine how many individuals use these jointly shared computers,

refer Resource Library readers to content sources through multiple pages in our website,

also provide direct links to individual pages within other websites -- for an estimate of the quantity of text and images in our website please see Content and paper-printed book equivalence.

Also please see our privacy policy.

Go to:

Digital libraries

Digitizing initiatives

TFAO digital library overview

Acquisition and deselection of content

Content retrieval

Usage

Web connectivity

Durability and protection of content

Open access

eBooks and public libraries

A vision of the future for digital libraries

A vision of the future for TFAO

A word about AI...

Historically, search engine activity has been the largest driver of access to our site's contents. Because of the way search algorithms work, our page files often aren't included in the first or second page of search results, even though our content's quality often surpasses that served up by the algorithms. There are exceptions. Some of our Topics in American Art like California Art History are often listed on the first page of search results. Commercial organizations and large institutions spend vast sums on SEO to drive inquiries to their sites. We don't.

Here's where AI changes the game and amplifies the value of our content. AI large language models probably scrape the entire contents of our Free Online Digital Library. Our hundreds of thousands of words are sliced and diced into a stew that's reformulated into answers to AI users' prompts. We've played with prompts limited to our content. The results are often pretty good. Other prompts allow use of the entire sea of data besides ours accessed from the internet.

The public education element of our mission - via our site's contents - isn't constrained any more by search engines. It's reborn into endless results of AI prompts. We aren't getting credited for our data, so its quality can't be measured. That problem, along with copyright issues, is serious. However, the public benefit of the AI output is vast. Clever people can ask large language models to limit prompt results to our website, but even then we suspect they leak snippets from their ocean of data when answering prompts.

Return to About TFAO

Links to sources of information outside of our web site are provided only as referrals for your further consideration. Please use due diligence in judging the quality of information contained in these and all other web sites. Information from linked sources may be inaccurate or out of date. TFAO neither recommends or endorses these referenced organizations. Although TFAO includes links to other web sites, it takes no responsibility for the content or information contained on those other sites, nor exerts any editorial or other control over them. For more information on evaluating web pages see TFAO's General Resources section in Online Resources for Collectors and Students of Art History.

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