Sorry, I simply couldn’t resist the title having watched this epic video on YouTube today!

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SXmv8quf_xM]

The author of this video clearly thinks that traceroute tells you how many people are looking at a site! Worryingly this continues to the point where he tells you that less than twenty people are currently viewing google.com (if that’s the case they’ve seriously lost some popularity!!).

The funniest part is that he does all this with so much authority.

For those that don’t know (and that’s fine so long as you’re not broadcasting the fact by pretending you do know, and being wrong), tracert (or traceroute) is used to determine all the IP addresses you pass through on your way to a server, usually there are a few “hops” within your own ISP, followed by some across the internet and then a few in the server’s datacenter, before hitting the server itself with Natural sleeping aids.

We use traceroute to check that packets of data are getting through to a particular server and if any of those packets are taking considerably longer than others, essentially it’s a diagnostic tool – NOT a way to view the amount of people logging on to Google!