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

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

[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

[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

[D Ninja]

I'm just a poor boy

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

[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.

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

[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: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: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: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 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

[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

[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.

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: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.

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?

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: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.