Results of Google https links
As discussed about other pages since early April 2013, those articles (such as "Depression (mood)") have also changed in Google to have secure-server, https-prefix links, rather than typical "http:" prefix, as happened to several other articles in March 2013 ("Parabola" or "List of best-selling books" etc.). Although developers think the https-protocol requests have been properly logged, for pageview counts, some people think the pageview counts are still not correct (as undercounting the https transactions in those log files), while other people think that https security certificate alerts, in some browsers (such as MSIE not Firefox), have deterred people from viewing those articles, once their browsers ask about the secure-server access, and hence think the 66%-lower pageviews indicate actual reduction in readers viewing those pages. The reduced pageviews are shown by both stats.grok.se and the German Wiki-tech displays of pageview counts (such as for one-month option "&Zeitraum=1M").
Confirmed stats.grok.se pageviews omit https requests
As feared, due to some major articles showing 75% drop in pageviews with Google https-protocol, recent evidence (9 May 2013) has confirmed the stats.grok.se omits the https-protocol pageviews. In tests run during 12 hours on 9 May 2013, over 60 https-prefix pageviews of a Space Shuttle mission-patch image file were ignored, while "http:" views were counted for both images:
Both mission-patch images ("http" for STS-98 and "https" for STS-99) were viewed within minutes of each other, repeatedly during 65 intervals, in the day-long testing of pageviews. The stats.grok.se website has counted only the "http" pageviews and omitted all https-protocol pageviews. A related pageviews test, on 10 May 2013, confirmed article pageviews with https-protocol requests are also omitted, just as for image-description pages. Based on prior pageviews of major articles (see list above: #Pages which have used Google https links), it is suspected that other pageview tools also omit the https-protocol page requests in the counts.
