Slashdot Mirror
Yahoo to Take on Google Analytics
whencanistop writes "Having seen Google set up their Google Analytics product for free (in an attempt to get everyone to spend more money on adwords) and then seen Microsoft release their version of a free web analytics tool into beta, Yahoo have decided to do the same thing, by buying someone else and releasing it into the wild for free. Great news for bloggers who don't want to sign up for Google's 'evil' plans."
The best way to compete with Google Analytics would be to set it up somehow so that I never see "Waiting for Google Analytics" in my browser while a page is blank, stalled and not loading.
--
make install -not war
Note that if you're using Firefox, its status bar may be misleading. I investigated causes of long page loads numerous times, and in many cases found that FF would actually be waiting on something other than what it says in the status bar. Not defending GA here, I don't have actual stats for how slow/fast they are, but just noting that status bar information is not always correct.
One site I manage, paid an IndexTools reseller for the Index Tools suite. I got to play around with it, and it is by far the best analytics program I've had the chance to get my hands on, better than Google's by a good margin.
This is excellent news for site owners... but I would guess not so good for the Index Tools resellers who have been making money off of reselling this product.
Awesome for me as a website owner.
Forgot I reinstalled my system, so I wasn't logged in.. doh.
How was DoubleClick evil? I'm not sure I get it. I worked there for 6 years, and know a lot about what went on. So I'm not really sure where they got such a bad reputation, other than they did what everyone else was doing and were successful at it.
That said, I will admit that the purchase and suggested integration of the offline catalog thingy (Abacus I think), was not well thought out, but I would also say that someone was going to try it, and they laid off as soon as it got to be an issue.
Otherwise, what does DCLK do? For the most part they are simply the middleman between the advertisers and the producers. Somehow they have a worse reputation than DeBeers, and they are the axe murderers of middlemen.
It's not like any of the sites that DCLK does business would suddenly just not have ads if DCLK never existed. DCLK didn't make popups to my knowledge. They were simply a transmission medium (ISP in some minds, virus in others, lol) that provided reporting and targeting for advertisers across multiple sites when the major sites were sort of walled fortresses. Meaning you had to book ads with Yahoo specifically through their ad dept., then go to Altavista, and book ads directly with them, etc. They just standardized things and made it so advertisers just had to learn one system to book ads on all of them.
I'm sure I'll earn some bad karma for this, but I am interested in the actual details of what they do that is different from everyone else in the business that singles them out.
http://blog.slaingod.com
You know what's worse? The unreliability of the results they show. Basically they get the number of pageviews right, and that's all they get. Because somehow they fail at telling who's the same visitor and who's a new visitor, a single visitor going through ten pages in 5 minutes (you can tell it's the same one by the hour, the city, or any other characteristic) might appear as such, or as 10 different visitors who only visited one page to never return. Which means that all the other indicators, number of unique visitors, pages/visits, bounce rate and time on site are meaningless.
But to be honest, I don't think Google cares, just like they don't care about Google Groups. They just add some features every now and then to make you happy, but they won't fix the big problems, they're all about marketshare and AdWords. In the case of Google Groups that's the search function. At some point they messed it up and now you'll have every single page of a discussion appearing in no precise order in your results. But I guess they care about Groups only to "own" USENET and be THE search engine for it.
You just got troll'd!