Any thoughts on this as my searches have not turned up much.

Does it use an apache module or do the pages have to be indexed in a database?

Also any tips on what to search for as obviously searching for "Most Read Script" etc brings up many inacurate results.

You might want some kind of a "ratings" script. If you're starting something new, you could look at CMS's, as some of them have this built in.

Thanks Beagle but this is not something new and it is becoming very popular on news sites. It is not a rating script as it seems to come from the server.

I wrote a little script to handle this thing a while back which worked quite well. I just add an img tag to the page at the bottom. the src attribute points to the script (with a few variables) which sends back a 1 px transparent gif then records the page, category and time. The for the most recent/popular section I just parse the data stored. real simple and real fast...

Just to clarify, by "something new" I meant what you're doing - that is, starting a new site or wanting to implement the feature on an already existing site.