Urchin Software Corp: The unlikely origin story of Google Analytics (2016) | Hacker News Reader

Urchin Software Corp: The unlikely origin story of Google Analytics (2016)

urchin.biz

274 pointscpeterso57 comments

> The UTM, or Urchin Traffic Monitor, was an early method for augmenting Apache (or IIS, etc.) log files with cookies, such that unique visitors could be established.

Of course, “utm” lives on today as a standard prefix for link tracking parameters, even outside of google analytics

Thanks for that info. I’ve wondered for years what the meaning of the utf parameter was.

Given its purpose, I always thought it was "user tracking mark" or similar.

Many of them described for GA: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/10917952

I can't really explain how cool Urchin was. I think it was one of the first truly analytical software I used — not just from a web traffic point of view, but it was a site that used and presented data. The graphs, the maps, even the two-column UI was stuff a lot of web developers copied and riffed on back then. It really opened my mind up to a lot of things: design, software as a service (and installable software), even acquisitions in general. Strangely had a large impact on my future career.

I'm very surprised that they signed up whole ISPs and got away with it.

I wasn't able to process the daily logs of the tracking pixel of the site I was operating on Urchin 5 within 24 hours. I had a beefy server with a 16 drive raid array but the log processing never used multiple cores.

By that time Google had aquired them, support didn't exist because they wanted you to switch to Google Analytics and it was basically 30k down the drain.

I loved this retell. Brings back the old days, especially the Google and Yahoo parties of the late 2000's. Those were crazy. They literally carried one of my employees out of a basement rave who had passed out from drinking too much.

Somehow, even on the opposite side of the globe software company parties also were not very timid. I spent a whole morning in 2009 in an ambulance and then in hospital with my colleague who passed out in a bar after a full night of drinking.

For maybe different reasons or circumstances. Nevertheless cheers, mate.

VC backed passing out was way different and not in the somewhat elitist sense that prevails in Europe.

Play hard, party hard mixed with friendly and open nerd frat house mentality in California is one of a kind compared to then cold and dark winters in Europe. People forget that there is essentially always sun, a huge difference.

Some had a 17:00 party break every weekday, loud music and food 17:00 sharp no exceptions, a phenomenon what became after work parties in Europe, but were more or less barbecue parties for casual idea sharing and bonding.

Catering costs for a month alone would have killed every startup or company in EU.

And then imagine special occasions somewhere else. These people knew how to have a good time - to pass out one way or the other.

Happy times.

Europe is big. Some parts get almost as much sun as California, and get hotter in the Summer. And other parts, like Russia, where the described events took place, have deeply ingrained alcohol culture not that far from frat mentality.

Sounds like something better left in the past

I was so excited to switch from Webtrends to Urchin and back when I still loved Google I was delighted that they bought it out and made it free. Now I wish Google had never touched them.

> Now I wish Google had never touched them.

It is incredible how out of touch with reality GA has become. Nothing is called what it used to be, and not a single straight report with simple familiar figures. Everything is abstracted to the point of it being useless. I am pretty sure I understand what happens with the GA team today [1]

We run self-hosted Matomo for analytics. One of the bonus points, besides actual sane reports is that Matomo can see about ~40% more traffic due to being invisible to blockers while being fully GDPR compliant and providing full privacy for visitors.

[1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/04/21/dont-let-architect...

> Now I wish Google had never touched them.

Would you be willing to elaborate?

After the switch to Google Analytics the heat map feature was dropped pretty quickly and it was one of the features I really enjoyed. I also think it would have been better for us in the long run to have paid for a service that let us maintain control over our data.

Yandex Metrica has free heatmap

I don’t think “Google bad” needs elaboration in 2024.

Many of the things people think are bad about Google in 2024 (trackers, targeting, slurping up user data, etc) came from Urchin.

The bad IMO originated from double click

I'm not so sure.

Google already had a reputation for slurping up user data, even in 2008 before they bought DoubleClick. It's a no brainer that a targetted advertising company can target ads better if they have as much information about the users as possible.

In 2008, DoubleClick's over the top, obnoxious advertising (banner ads, punch the monkey, etc.) was slowing down in favor of Google's more discrete advertising and data collection. They may have caught on and turned it around eventually, but Google bought them up first.

Oh man, what a shift moving from webtrends to urchin. Between that and following the regular "google dance" on the webmasterworld forums what a time to be alive.

> Our first tradeshow ever, circa 1997.

Pardon my one nitpick: the computer in the photo (PowerMac1,1) was introduced 1999-01-05.

Further backed up by the fact that the photos show "Urchin 3.0" signs, and the article mentions: "In 1999, Brett Crosby, VP of Sales and Marketing, was casting about trying to get Urchin 2.0 noticed."

That picture of their first computer, a sparcstation, brought back memories.

Our first computer at Cygnus was a sparcstation that was actually a “prototype” (probably PVT since it had all the housing etc) for the first sparcstation. I think Andy B had given it to John. It worked fine and lasted for years.

When the author said they’d started the company on a 10K investment I knew they were my kind of people.

Worked at a hosting company in those years.. urchin was the GOAT. we ran it for every customer, and relied on it heavily for billing our customers. It was crazy fast and elegant. Nothing came close

Urchin is not Google advertising's only origin story...

See also "A Brief History of NetGravity":

In October 1999, DoubleClick purchased NetGravity in a stock deal valued at $530m. The NetGravity product line is now completely incorporated into the DoubleClick portfolio of advertising management products. The original founders and management team have all left to pursue new opportunities. NetGravity, having helped to create the multi-billion dollar internet advertising market, has essentially ceased to exist.

-- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41206733

DoubleClick rebranded NetGravity AdServer as DART Enterprise... On March 11, 2008, Google acquired DoubleClick for $3.1 billion. In June 2018, Google announced plans to rebrand its ads platforms, and DoubleClick was merged into the new Google Marketing Platform brand.

-- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DoubleClick

> Urchin is not Google advertising's only origin story...

Further because that leaves out the Overture / Inktomi part of Google’s revenue origin story…

Yahoo bought them.

Sure, but what did Yahoo also do? They settled the patent suit that was jeopardizing Google’s IPO. What were those terms? Find out and learn a fascinating part of Google’s history.

Spoiler alert: Google agreed to give yahoo $300m worth of Google IPO shares.

There’s more to it than that.

This was the most consequential purchase, it’s the one product Google will never sunset because it is Google.

So have a good idea, be lucky and smart, and most importantly come from really rich families because floating 2.8million through two (!!?) crashes on an obvious now technology but log processing in the early 2000s is like describing how to win powerball.

what's the obvious new technology right now, and why aren't you doing it?

Urchin analytics (which, IIRC, were provided to us by our host OVH for free at the time) is what taught me what I would still call Rule #1 of being a webmaster:

> Tracking your analytics makes traffic grow. Refreshing your analytics makes traffic stall.

Could you elaborate on that? The meaning of “makes traffic stall” is lost on me, unless you simply mean “don’t obsess over it, just look at long-term trends”.

Because humans like to see lines go up to the right, there's a weird Gaussian curve where

- never checking your analytics means you're probably going to stagnate forever,

- checking them at a fixed frequency means you're going to look at what's worked and work hard to keep it going, so traffic grows,

- checking them at every time of the hour (I was at my worst when I switched from Urchin to Xiti client-side analytics in '06) means you're switching back to a passive almost-superstitious wait for the number to move, which is both frustrating and extremely ineffective.

I've been there and done all 3, and as CEO of a startup[0] I find it's my job to do my best to stay in the middle :)

[0] https://onetake.ai

Discussed at the time (of the article):

The origin story of Google Analytics - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12986649 - Nov 2016 (53 comments)

What about defunct startup shirts? Like, I’d wear that Urchin shirt.

That sounds like a potential business idea even. Although realistically I guess eBay and Craigslist already has that covered :p

UA to GA4 finally got us to abandon google analytics for cookie free cloudflare completing the cycle

UA transition shook me out too. Who breaks backwards compatibility??

Love reading stories like this! Thank you.

I DO know about Yellow Dog Linux as it was the Linux officially supported on a PS3 console!

Personal story: in 2006 in Google Enterprise, we had many, many meetings with the GA team, the goal being a private, inside-the-firewall box that would run GA, using our Google Search Appliance hardware.

This never came to anything.

In 2006, I worked for a company that built exactly that: A web analytics engine that ran behind the firewall. It would rely on a reverse proxy and not on cookies or pixels, so it couldn't be blocked.

They even had some of the biggest sites in Europe as customers.

However, the company never turned a profit and after going through the hands of a few investors, they closed shop.

Yeah, "inside the firewall" declined as a marketing pitch pretty quickly.

Security over convenience is also something that declined pretty quickly as well followed quickly by the concept of privacy in exchange for convenience.

With what we know about how/why/where the use of those analytics are used back then, would we make the same decisions if it was a choice today?

We were Urchin users prior to the acquisition and were also Google AdWords customers...

I remember being shocked at the idea of putting Google's JavaScript in our secure e-commerce site. We wanted to pay as little as possible for traffic and were mining the long tail of keywords. We certainly did not want AdWords to know what our economics were.

Ultimately AdWords evolved into a very efficient system that groups similar keywords and takes as much margin as the advertisers can handle. The golden days of a level playing field in ppc advertising were over and Google won the game :)

The fact ga4 doesn't even do what urchin did back when Google bought it tells you everything you need to know about how great this software (and company) truly was.

It doesn't necessarily show that Urchin was great, it is an example of the dumbing down of software that happens these days.

Hmm. So this is the ancestor of stuff I block with my pihole now?

Had a chance to meet Brett at the Google offices shortly after the acquisition. Really nice guy, had a lot of good advice about being a founder.

I remember switching from some cgi script web counter to urchin and it was incredible the insights it unlocked. Good nostalgia hit.

(2016)

(In case anyone else is surprised by the line in the article that the “10th anniversary of the acquisition has recently passed.”)

I think a lot of people forget some of the other Google origin stories.

Android was a company Google acquired.

Wow- a lot of similarity to what's important with analytics today! Depth of analytics and speed of queries were their key competitive differentiators. Those are still ones we hammer at Amplitude. Also individual visitor history drill-down (we call it user timelines) is one of the most used features in Amplitude today.

I have a huge amount of respect for the Urchin team. They had to figure out everything for the first time on their own with nothing to go off of while going after a much smaller and earlier market.

Oh, that domain I block. I still have no idea what they actually do, but they sound really scary.

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