When Google acquisitions go wrong: the disappointing story of Urchin | Hacker News Reader

When Google acquisitions go wrong: the disappointing story of Urchin

arstechnica.com

10 pointsalaskamiller7 comments

Um, no-brainer: if you sell something people can use can on their own servers, you can't spy on their logs. Everything Google does is geared towards collecting data, so the other Urchin products are really not relevant for Google.

They don't appear to be relevant to Google because they don't help Google better determine ways to leverage AdWords and AdSense. GA's JavaScript snippet in fact returns to Google more and more pertinent information than is resident in the average web server log file. Plus it removes the spiders and non-page view data just by being a JavaScript-based tracking solution so that's less work and cleaner data for them (and anyone else who does this e.g. all of the other Web analytics vendors).

I sure wouldn't be disappointed if I had shares in Urchin, or Google for that matter.

I'm sure all the Game Neverending enthusiasts were bummed too. But as a startup founder, I'm not going to sympathize much over how Flickr was a "disappointing story" for them.

I think it'd be neat if Google Analytics let you send your actual log data to them. Even in an efficient binary format it would be a lot of bandwidth, but the accuracy and extra information would be worth it to me.

I think it would be less bandwidth. Considering the overhead of all the individual HTTP headers both in request and response, you could reduce that significantly by batching up log files and uploading them at regular intervals, perhaps once a day? GA seems to perform batch updates at that interval in any case so it might not even put a big cramp in their style from that perspective.

However, there are a bunch more issues with this. To allow this, they'd have to be able to parse all of the most popular Web server log formats. This, in and of itself, is not that hard until you account for people customizing their logging format via measures like the LogFormat directive in Apache. As well, customizing the log format is a virtual necessity, as GA requires more information than is in the standard log formats of most web servers. Another issue is that the use of a JavaScript snippet on the page prevents non-browser user agents from appearing, clearing GA's logs of spiders and other such cruft that detracts from determining human user behavior (what they are apparently most interested in for the purposes of optimizing AdWords and AdSense).

But the biggest problem for them, I think, is that with this method they are no longer able to set first-party cookies on your user's browsers and thus (more) reliably track individual (read: human) users. So, in effect, they would waste time with this, in that they'd still have to make you put a JS snippet on the page to set cookies that you'd then have to modify your web server logging format to include in every hit. Urchin worked like this back when it was still alive and you could run it on your own servers. So, all in all, it seems like something Google would just be wasting their time in doing given what they want to get out of your data.

I meant that sending my log data to Google would require bandwidth to upload those logs. Using the javascript method requires bandwidth from Google and users, but not me as a site owner. Either way its not a big concern unless it's done in real-time.

Lots of requests to a site are not page loads that include Javascript. All static content requests, API calls, and anything called remotely is missed by GA.

More than just robots don't support Javascript. Many of mobile devices don't. The Javascript method is also inherently inaccurate. It relies on browsers doing something on each page, and that something doesn't always happen.

I think what they have is great, but it's not a complete analytics solution. I still have to analyze my log data because GA misses out on some very basic stuff. If someone wrote a competitor to GA and accepted my log data, so it was comprehensive and super accurate I would switch immediately.

That's the problem when you buy proprietary software; if the company decides to stop making it, you're screwed.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com