Saturday 1 October 2011

Publish Or Perish (ctd.)


At the end of each quarter, I have a look at the number of decisions published on the DG3 site so far. Here are the updated figures:

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As you can see, the number of decisions published during the last quarter is quite normal but overall we are still significantly behind what had been published during the last years. 2009 appears to have been an exceptional vintage.

On a different note, I have made a curious observation regarding the geographical origin of the readers of this blog. As already mentioned some time ago, in the beginning the blog was mostly read by the French, for historical reasons. Over the last months, Germany was more and more strongly represented and finally overtook France, but recently, the number of German readers has sharply decreased whereas now the French come back and the Dutch skyrocket. 

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I wonder what the reason could be. The overall number of readers per month appears to have increased, but not dramatically. Has the EPO recently made a change in its proxies so that my readers from the Office would be identified as Dutch whereas they were identified as German before? Difficult to say. Perhaps these Google data are simply not reliable.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

All of the EPO's IP traffic for ALL sites (Den Haag, München, Wien, and Berlin) has always been routed through The Hague. It is obviously easier to manage the centralized intra-/internet interface when there is only one point of contact, since a large bandwidth must be anyway be provided for the large internal traffic. The patent databases and image servers and the IT department that maintains them are also essentially located at Plaspoelpolder.

Anonymous said...

I would furthermore notice the coincidence between the increase of traffic from NL, and the decrease in the number of published decisions.

Since some believe that correlation is causation...

Laurent Teyssèdre said...

Yes, all visits from the EPO are transiting through Rijswijk.

Anonymous said...

"All of the EPO's IP traffic for ALL sites (Den Haag, München, Wien, and Berlin) has always been routed through The Hague."

Are you sure? Then why is it that Google has redirected examiners in The Hague to www.google.de instead of www.google.nl for some years now?

Or did Google simply classify the EPO proxy in The Hague as German? That might explain things as well.

Anonymous said...

I'm pretty wary of Datenkrake Google, I am nevertheless quite confident that the behaviour you're witnessing is merely the result of a local setting.

I would check with another browser on the same machine.