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An Internet search engine wants to measure which of the different links to web documents, listed by the search engine, are most often clicked on by its users. How can it measure this?

Answer

Suppose the search engine web site has the URL http://search-engine.foo.net, and it wants to provide a link to http://listed-page.foo.bar. It can then provide the following link in its link list:
http://search-engine.foo.net/countaccesses?listed-page.foo.bar

When the user clicks, the user web browser will then access the search engine at http://search-engine.foo.net/countaccesses.

countacess is then the name of a process on the search engine server, which will count the link access, and will then return a HTTP redirect to http://listed-page.foo.bar. The user will not notice anything except a slight delay in delivery of the page.

This method is commonly named "click-through".

It is probably also possible to use some kind of "OnClick" Javascript code to report the clickthrough to the search engine.

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