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."

Comments

Followers

[Nudo]

Yahoo just tags along...

Re:Followers

[Anonymous Coward]

"Yahoo?" More like "Metoo."

Good luck with all that

[carcosa30]

It's funny to watch Yahoo scrambling for market share. If the Microsoft bid is successful, it'll be funny to watch Microsoft hitching their wagon to Yahoo. Two boat anchors fall twice as fast.

It's not quite game set and match to Google, but in a number of spaces it's starting to look like endgame.

Re:Good luck with all that

[Kickersny.com]

Two boat anchors fall twice as fast.

I think our friend Newton that would disagree with that.

Re:Good luck with all that

[larry bagina]

Galileo.

Re:Good luck with all that

[eebra82]

Two boat anchors fall twice as fast. I think our friend Newton that would disagree with that. And our friend Darwin would question the existence of the first poster.

Re:Good luck with all that

[Goaway]

Not necessarily. Anchors usually fall in water, where drag is high and terminal velocity is quickly reached. Thus the speed of fall mainly depends on the combined drag of the two anchors, which may or may not be twice the drag of one anchor, depending on all kinds of factors.

Re:Good luck with all that

[MrNaz]

An easy example of working out terminal velocity can be calculated with Stokes' Law.

In general terms, the two anchors are likely to fall at the same rate assuming they dont affect each other's fluid displacement, as you would expect if they are falling side by side. If, however, one was on top of the other, then the sink speed would likely increase, as you'd have a greater mass behind the displacement and hence a greater force, but the turbulence caused by the leading edge of the lower anchor would likely decrease the drag experienced by the second.

Of course, the fact that the anchors are not regular shapes means that this becomes monstrously complex when you try to actually calculate any numbers. In fact, even were they two perfect spheres, it'd still be monstrously complex. Come to think of it, fluid dynamics is monstrously complex in general.

Monstrously yours,
- Naz.

Re:Good luck with all that

[ImaLamer]

The original poster meant in a vacuum, you insensitive clod!

Re:Good luck with all that

[iminplaya]

Two boat anchors fall twice as fast.

And they'll cut twice as many cables

Re:Good luck with all that

[FooAtWFU]

Galileo!

Re:Good luck with all that

[Devv]

No Darwin only explained why ANIMALS fall downwards. Animals that would fall upwards disappeared out into space and couldn't breed on earth. This of course, only applies to animals living in the northern hemisphere. A animal from the southern hemisphere that is brought to the northern hemisphere would disappear into space.

Re:Good luck with all that

[Nerdposeur]

Marco!

Re:Good luck with all that

[IRGlover]

Galileo Figaro!

Re:Good luck with all that

[BlueGecko]

I actually have to disagree with your sentiment. It's long past time that Yahoo had a competitor to Analytics, because it dramatically increases the value of Yahoo's ad service.

Most people focus on Analytics as being good for web developers because it lets them track where their visitors come from. That's true, but missing the point: the value for web developers that Google cares about is that it helps you, both directly and indirectly, increase your ad revenue. In so doing, they increase their own revenue, both immediately (the more clicked-on ads you have, the more they get paid) and long-term (if you're making more money, you're more likely to keep using them). Analytics is the perfect loss-leader for online advertising.

Yahoo, meanwhile, lacks any such tool. Yes, the Yahoo Publisher Network lets you get basic ad stats, but it just doesn't approach the information Google can give me with their AdWords + Analytics combination. If I'm going to be using Analytics, why not just use AdWords/Double Click too, and be done with it? Acquiring an Analytics competitor gives Yahoo vertical integration on one of their key products in a way that should directly positively impact their bottom line.

Though this may be Yahoo "scrambling for market share," it's a smart scramble. More of this and fewer surreal pairings with AOL, and Yahoo could return to viability.

Re:Good luck with all that

[B3ryllium]

I would suggest rephrasing it as "Two boat anchors hit bottom twice as hard."

But, then again, my understanding of physics is very limited.

Re:Good luck with all that

[Cyclopedian]

Magnifico!!

Re:Good luck with all that

[D Ninja]

I'm just a poor boy

Re:Good luck with all that

[freemywrld]

Polo!

Re:Good luck with all that

[akumria]

A
Monstrously yours,
- Naz. I think you mean:

Monstrously yours,
  - Summer Glau

Re:Good luck with all that

[Nerdposeur]

Thank you. :D

Re:Good luck with all that

[freemywrld]

Now we just need someone to call "fish out of water"! LOL

Re:Good luck with all that

[D4MO]

Nobody loves me

Google-analytics.com is a PITA

[Anonymous Coward]

If people are going to use Google Analytics for their sites, perhaps they should wait until Google fixes google-analytics.com so it can actually handle the demand. I'm sick and bloody tired of siting and staring at Firefox as it waits for a response from Googles asthmatic servers.

Back on topic, who cares what Yahoo! are doing? They haven't been a relevant force on the web since 2001.

Re:Google-analytics.com is a PITA

[flufffy]

Yup and also let you export more than 500 lines of data at once. This is a restriction which renders it pretty much useless for our site.

Re:Google-analytics.com is a PITA

[Anonymous Coward]

Javascript's defer attribute is your friend.

Re:Google-analytics.com is a PITA

[4D6963]

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.

I got a flash advert from google the other day.

[Colin Smith]

Now I don't get anything...

Funny how life is.

Who is more evil?

[ThirdPrize]

Yahoo or Google? There is only one way to find out ...

Re:Who is more evil?

[Colonel Korn]

Through Doubleclick, Google's the most evil online entity. Yahoo's taking a step in that direction though.

Re:Who is more evil?

[ajs]

Through Doubleclick, Google's the most evil online entity. Yahoo's taking a step in that direction though. Doubleclick was an annoying company that cared nothing for its actual users and only for their paying customers, true (though now that Google has purchased them, it's pretty clear that they're simply being dismantled for people and customers). Yahoo! has been turning in Chinese political dissidents. I'm having a hard time drawing an ethically parallel line between those.

When a company says that their guiding principle is not to be evil, perhaps it's not the best use of our time to seek out evil in everything they do. Perhaps we could continue to treat them like any other company and judge them on their deeds?

Re:Who is more evil?

[slaingod]

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.

Thank you Adblock

[Gothmolly]

http://.google-analytics.com/*

I heard of Google Analytics in the first few seconds after I installed Adblock, and then never worried about it again.

Re:Thank you Adblock

[MoonlightSeraphim]

I was bothered by them first few seconds on a random website before my NoScript went Untrusted -> google-analytics.com

Re:Thank you Adblock

[internewt]

You're gonna want to make sure you block *urchin.js* too with adblock, and I think */_ga.js* since some sites have the Google javascript in a different file. I think the way Google spy-alytics works is that a bit of JS runs from the domain you're browsing, either in a file called urchin.js [1] or directly on the webpage, and when combined with another script from google-analytics.com it then phones home with your habits.

Also block third party cookies.... I have never seen a site break when you block third party cookies, and they're only used for nefarious purposes anyway. An add-on for FF might be needed to make changing this option easier, but an add-on will also allow management of other cookies: I recommend totally blocking 3rd party cookies and accepting first party as session only, and allow longterm cookies for sites you trust or you know aren't trending.

Oh, and modify your existing adblock filter to catch http and https! My bank (Barclays in the UK) have third-party based tracking on their online banking, and the spy-scripts and graphics are served by https (only to be blocked by adblock!). I'm pretty sure I've seen trending crap served up by https on other sites too.

Re:Thank you Adblock

[contrapunctus]

Have you heard anything good/bad about the customizegoogle extension on firefox? It has an option to "anonymize the google cookie uid" and "don't send any cookies to google analytics" under privacy.

Re:Thank you Adblock

[Kalriath]

That's not informative, that's wrong! If you're seeing urchin.js on a site (NOT from google-analytics.com) then you're actually seeing a site who uses the Urchin software (which is not a service, it's a program on the server) for their analytics, not Google - so they have no access to your browsing history other than what they can get from their own logfiles, and Google has nothing. There is also absolutely no local javascript file for Google Analytics, the whole thing needs to run from Google's server.

Re:Anonymous Coward

[ForumTroll]

Why did the small potato murder all of the other potatoes??? Can't the potatoes all just get along?

What is the value?

[Anonymous Coward]

While I think competition is good in pretty much any format, I'm starting to wonder what value all of these additional analytic tools are providing. I'm an online marketing manager and with Google Analytics, Microsoft's Gatineau (or whatever they call it now) and server logs, the market for free analytics software is already saturated. Then there's the considerable amount of premium packages such as Webtrends etc that all, in the end, essentially show the same friggen data in different ways.

As an aside, if the Microsoft bid does go through, do they merge Gatineau and Indextools? Would anyone really care if either went away?

Re:What is the value?

[sabernet]

I wonder if this move is to poison the waters of sorts. Microsoft wants a chunk of Google's marketshare in search and marketing.

If Yahoo release this for free then Microsoft buys Yahoo forcefully, this would mean they either have to give away their analytics tool or kill this one off, causing more ire in the webosphere(or whatever they call it now) they are trying desperately to appeal to of late.

Re:Google is NOT EVIL

[ForumTroll]

We've had this conversation more than once, but to those who have not been aware, Google is not evil.....yet.

Whew. Thank god you posted! For a second there I thought that I might have to form an opinion of my own. Thank you Slashdot collective!

Google Analytics = Urchin

[Anonymous Coward]

The blurb sounds kind of down on Yahoo for buying somebody and then giving the product away, but Google did exactly the same thing. Google Analytics is a retooled version of Urchin, a web stats company that Google purchased in 2005.

Re:Google Analytics = Urchin

[ajs]

Well, yes and no. I think Google has done an excellent job on the stats-display end. For a small site, the service is free, and I really get quite a lot out of it.

Re:Google Analytics = Urchin

[ubernostrum]

Well, yes and no. I think Google has done an excellent job on the stats-display end.

The fancy interface largely came from Measure Map, another acquisition.

Re:Google is NOT EVIL

[Janos421]

but the point is, you shouldn't be putting your information on the net if you do not wish for it to be seen. What information am I putting on the net when I'm just browsing a web site with Google/DoubleClick ads/analytics? None I presume, but that does not prevent Google from getting sensitive information about my habits

The difference is, when you ask Google that you'd like to remain private, they listen and and stop prying. Seriously? Never heard of that, could you tell me where the form is?

--
Search engines are not your friends : SquiggleSR

Get Out of the Way for Victory

[Doc Ruby]

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.

Re:Get Out of the Way for Victory

[TheSunborn]

That would be easy to do with google analytic. Just modify the javascript so that it look at the dom, and if the google analytic code is not last code in the html document, just above the tag, replace the entire website with a "PLACE THE JAVASCRIPT AT THE BOTTOM, THE WAY GOOGLE DOCUMENTET IT SO IT DON'T PREVENT THE LOADING OF THE PAGE

Anyone up for a greace monkey script?

Re:Get Out of the Way for Victory

[Quixote]

Adblock is your friend. :-)

I block any 3rd-party site that takes too long to respond.

Re:Get Out of the Way for Victory

[garcia]

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.

IMHO, Yahoo isn't exactly the best at having speedy web applications. I *pay* for my Flickr account (yes, it's fairly inexpensive for the benefits) and I find that the interface is slow as hell most of the time and that any sort of long loading (editing a set, placing photos on their map which is also very slow loading, moving items around, or loading all your sets when you have 100s of them) is absolutely fucking painful.

So, don't count on it.

Re:Get Out of the Way for Victory

[ajs]

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. That's just a terribly designed site that should be put to death mercifully. If Google's service is tar-pitting your page rendering, then you've done it wrong (probably loading lots of data as XML and then rendering it using JavaScript after the page is fully loaded. Good sites simply don't do this.

Re:Get Out of the Way for Victory

[Doc Ruby]

I'm talking about Slashdot. How shall we kill it? I've been wondering that for years. Is there a FF plugin to do it?

Re:Get Out of the Way for Victory

[Mike89]

Anyone up for a greace monkey script?

Fuck it, it's easier just to AdBlock it. And yeah, I have had the same Google Analytics load delay crap, up until that. Even when it is done properly (it was on a forum I visit, they scrapped it not long after), it still slows everyone down.

Re:Get Out of the Way for Victory

[pjt33]

I stick them in /etc/hosts pointing to 127.0.0.1 and run a simple webserver which returns 404s quickly.

Re:Get Out of the Way for Victory

[ajs]

I'm talking about Slashdot. How shall we kill it? I've been wondering that for years. Is there a FF plugin to do it? I've never seen this on Slashdot, but I'll take your word for it. I'm wondering if Firefox is just mis-reporting (e.g. neither the download from Slashdot nor Google is complete, and it just happens to have the Google info in the status bar since it was most recent).

Re:Get Out of the Way for Victory

[Doc Ruby]

As I posted this reply, as I see with most pages, the FF status bar showed "Waiting for www.google-analytics.com" (very briefly, though sometimes it stalls with a blank page for quite a while). It also flashes "Waiting for ads.doubleclick.net", but doesn't get hung up, that I can recall.

I don't know whether the report is accurate. But if Yahoo has a way to avoid getting the blame like that, maybe even just by enforcing the placement of the links to them in site HTML, then they'll score a victory over Google.

Re:Google is NOT EVIL

[kahrytan]

We are Slashdot. You will be assimilated into the collective conscience. Resistance is futile.

Firefox status bar info

[asserted]

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.

Re:Firefox status bar info

[Doc Ruby]

A clickable "Details..." button on the Status Bar sounds like a great FF plugin. And if it aggregated (anonymous) stats to a collection/publishing website, those results might encourage sites to improve their loading performance. Could make some money selling access to the stats, maybe even send some money back to those who submitted the stats used (or maybe a lottery among them so they could get some real money).

Re:Google is NOT EVIL

[Hatta]

The difference is, when you ask Google that you'd like to remain private, they listen and and stop prying.

Really? So I can opt out of having my search queries linked to my IP address and stored in a database? How?

The amount of information Google has on me, even though I don't have an account, or store a google cookie, is absolutely chilling.

Google Will Be Tough To Beat

[WebmasterNeal]

Having used Google Analytics for free for the past 2 years, it will be tough for these up and coming analytics packages to beat them, especially the ones offered for free. Probably the only way they will convert new users is offer them relevant reports that GA doesn't. GA has recently included several new features as well. Whatever Google wants to do with my analytics data is fine, since I get so few visitors to my site.

Re:Google is NOT EVIL

[MMC Monster]

The difference is, when you ask Google that you'd like to remain private, they listen and and stop prying. Seriously? Never heard of that, could you tell me where the form is? I'm not sure if this is what the grandparent post meant:

If you log into google, it is possible to suspend your web history. I just checked myself and my web history was on pause since the third week of February. I just unpaused it.

Now, google likely is still getting information about you while the history is paused but just isn't showing it to you.

Correction

[zedlander]

Great news for bloggers who don't mind having Microsoft's 'evil' plans hanging over their heads.

you call it analytics

[Anonymous Coward]

i call it Javascript based spyware
same as binary based spyware, the user has no idea its there and transmits unknown data to a third party

Re:you call it analytics

[whencanistop]

This isn't insightful either.

If you blocked the javascript tag from loading the person who owns the website you're looking at doesn't know you're looking at it. If the person who owns the website tells the advertisers that nobody is looking at it, they don't sign up to advertise. The website doesn't make any money through online advertising and either closes down or hides everything behind a subscription wall. If it closes down everyone gets annoyed because they can't see the good content. If it goes behind a subscription barrier, you get annoyed because you have to pay for it directly and then probably still get tracked anyway, because you are over a secure connection.

Seriously though - tell me what the worst that could happen if you did accept the cookies? The worst thing that could happen is that nobody pays any attention to you. The best thing is that you get better pages, better content and more appropriate advertising overall improving your browsing experience.

Gartner's $50billion market was wrong.

[cheekyboy]

Its funny how in the late 90s or 2000, all these big boys Gartner Research etc.. were saying the web/proxy/nameu4server analytics were a $50billion market.

Who ever trusts these 27yo analyst's who were in baby rockers when us elite coders were hard at work hacking the vic-20s.

Yes log files are dead, even tho our app did process faster than anything, 3-5m lines per second on todays fast PCs (random benchmark spec, take your pick)

Who knows maybe someone will make a analytics engine language in a few years anal++ ? analql? But in the mean time, these high price search engine optimization companies have little life left in them... go google or yahoo! take over the world!, (because investors & managers outside the usa have no clue to do the same)

Excellent - where do I sign up.

[sherriw]

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.

Re:Google is NOT EVIL

[Starayo]

Or, maybe it's sarcasm.

Re:"Evil?"

[whencanistop]

It's Google's fault because their strapline was 'don't be evil'. My use of it is merely indicative of the social climate of taking what one person says and turning it back on themselves. I know you are, but what am I.

Grammar Police

[harveyr]

"Yahoo have decided to do the same thing...."

"Yahoo" is a single entity.

Re:Widely different specs.

[Kalriath]

Fuck off with your "nimp.org" links you bloody cock.

DO NOT CLICK PROVIDED LINK.

I'm amazed at how these pieces of shit have so rapidly established a way to ensure their comment is so relevant to every discussion.

FireStats

[omry_y]

I am developing a web stats system called FireStats.
check out the demo at http://demo.firestats.cc/firestats
FireStats supports referrers, popular pages, countries, browser, operating systems and much more.

it's self hosted, so private data about your users will not be handed on a silver plate to anyone.