The vast majority of our traffic comes from Google searches, and we can't really block those off, nor do we want to.

Among traffic which comes from links, most of it comes from other SE sites, and I don't think there's anywhere in the network that is recommending us as a place to get homework problems solved.

Yeah, hard and unreliable at best, more likely impossible. I don't think Google even passes on the search terms in many cases.

Huh, that's not good. What do you find for those searches?

This might be something to talk to SE about. They have put a fair amount of work into optimizing our position in search results, although they've focused more on making sure questions show up high in the results for searches relevant to that specific question, less so on the ranking of the site as a whole.

I or one of the other mods can bring it up with them.

It's possible, although we do want to be wary about deleting anything too quickly. We don't want to shut off the community's chance to review it.

Yeah... that's part of the reason the mods are reluctant to delete questions manually, except when they're spam or some such thing.

In any case, questions which are downvoted and don't have upvoted answers (plus some other minor criteria) are automatically deleted by the system.

According to some posts on Meta Stack Exchange, in site analytics there is (or at least was) moderator-only tab which contains search keywords used to arrive to the site.

So perhaps mods could help you out @Chair. Although as you see from my link, some people have complained about quality of the output shown in this tab.

BTW for me physics homeworks exercises returns as the first hits some posts from this site and from its meta. (Which is rather unsurprising, since I used phrase very similar to name of a specific tag. In fact, I expected to see more results from here.)

@Chair Well, from the meta posts is seems that this feature (keywords) is mod-only. Not the "regular" analytics accessible to users above 25k.

@MartinSleziak The search keywords analytics are pretty useless. Out of something like 10M search engine referrals, there are about 9.5M for which the search terms were not provided. For rare search terms, the analytics page gives "samples" of search phrases, which are mostly obvious singletons.

For example, the page currently says that 1750 people came to the site using the search phrase "how do you defeat that monster vampire in the sewers in witcher3 when trying to help triss and the mages escape novigrad"; that 1750 people came to the site using the search phrase "what is a curl in electromagnetic"; and that 3501 people came using the search phrase "derivative sqrt(-g) metric".

I interpret that to mean that the first two search phrases were each used once, that the person using the third phrase visited two pages, and that the list of search phrases I can see on the moderator page represents about 0.06% of the total search terms.

@Chair Some of what I told you above was based on the mod analytics.

@rob The SE network: "Come for Witcher 3 advice, stay for the physics!"

I've speculated in the past that it probably stores fractions, not absolute hit counts, and rounds to some number of decimal places that corresponds to e.g. 1750.4 hits.

@DavidZ I found the sampling explanation in some actual documentation a couple of years ago.

Oh, interesting, I never knew that was described anywhere (outside of the company)