purplecape - 8:51 pm on Jul 25, 2008 (gmt 0)

coachm, I think that Google's stats, though flawed, do give us something to go on.

I don't have anything like the volume of traffic that HP must have, but if my site starts off poorly in a given day, the usual pattern is that it doesn't pick up. If this particular channel on HP's site has as much or more traffic as my site, I tend to think that it's reasonable to draw the conclusion after several hours of poor performance that it's not going to pick up later.