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The origin story of Google Analytics
- mrz1818 10y agoGreat read! Thanks!
- rwmj 10y agoAlso the reason why you sometimes see utm_campaign=... (and other utm_*) appearing in URL query strings. https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1033863?hl=en https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1033863?hl=en
- bayonetz 10y agoI like the different acronym mistakes people always (and very authoritatively) make for utm. "It stands for Universal Task Module" "Nope, it stands for Universal Tracking Monitor!" ... inevitably the old guy jumps in, "Kids, let me tell you about back in the day when we used Urchin"
- SippinLean 10y agoFor a while the JS that Google handed off to you was "urchin.js"
- degenerate 10y agoFor years, actually. I kind of chuckled when they finally changed it.
- miyuru 10y agobtw, they still have urchin.js file on GA servers https://google-analytics.com/urchin.js https://google-analytics.com/urchin.js
- blakesterz 10y agoThat was a great read! I've been doing this long enough that I still complain about how much I hate GA compared to the old Urchin. I used Urchin for years and loved it. I was all excited to see what it had become as it changed to GA, and it was just... blah. It went from this super incredibly powerful tool that gave me access to all sorts of stats I needed, to this... I dunno... seemingly random assortment of things that seemed like would only excite someone that worked at Google or had AdWords on their site. That was, of course, probably the goal, so I suppose they succeed, but damn I still miss the old Urchin numbers I'd see every day. They were useful for webmasters and sys admins. GA is useful for those trying to see more ads (not that there's anything wrong with that, but that ain't me).
- buro9 10y agoThe lessons learned at the bottom are fantastic. This is a must-read.
- fzn 10y agoUrchin 4 continued our tradition of supporting way, way too many random platforms (Google still has Urchin 4 help: check out the OS support… ever heard of Yellow Dog Linux?). Heck yeah! Yellow Dog was one of first GNU/Linux distro I attempted to use, back in 2k2 (Or was it SUSE 6.4? Both ran too sluggishly for desktop use on my 5400/120, tho.) Here's the trial Urchin 5 for RedHat 6, btw. https://web.archive.org/web/20060223041140/http://download.urchin.com/urchin5/urchin5703_redhat9x.tar.gz https://web.archive.org/web/20060223041140/http://download.u...
- chamakits 10y agoI remember Yellow Dog Linux ONLY because it was the official Linux Distribution supported by the PS3. Didn't use it enough to know how it distinguished itself from other distros beyond that, but thats enough of a distinction for me!
- keepper 10y agoThey live on in a small tool they built... The Yellowdog Updater, Modified. Now just known as yum.
- Gevuloth 10y agoNow superceded by dnf on Fedora, sadly.
- SwellJoe 10y agoDoes anyone prefer the name dnf? I will likely never agree that it should have been renamed to dnf, even though it represents a significant amount of rewriting. yum is an incomparably better name. "dnf" is even worse than "apt".
- toomanybeersies 10y agoDNF always makes me think of the fact that in racing, DNF stands for Did Not Finish.
- m3rc 10y agoLong path up to just getting blocked by no-script
- _ao789 10y agoYeah, go figure right..
- patmcguire 10y agoToken ring in 1995? I guess a lot changes in 20 years. Networking was very different then, ethernet cards were like $600 in '93 https://books.google.com/books?id=mhAEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA67&dq=ethernet+adapter+thousand+dollars+1990s&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjxp_GP4LLQAhVEw4MKHWtmAsgQ6AEIHTAA#v=onepage&q=ethernet%20adapter%20thousand%20dollars%201990s&f=false https://books.google.com/books?id=mhAEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA67&dq=et...
- EvanAnderson 10y agoI'm a little dubious that it was actually Token Ring, based on the description. From "coaxial cable with fun twist-lock fittings" it sounds more like thin-wire Ethernet-- 10Base-2. That would be a lot lower cost and definitely more common than token ring in '95.
- NDizzle 10y agoI supported a token ring network in 1998, but that was the emergency room network at a hospital in Arkansas. You're right - it sounds like BNC.
- unixhero 10y agoToken ring delivered 16mbit, 6mbits more than regular 10-base-2 coaxial or twisted pair Ethernet at the time.
- Florin_Andrei 10y agoYeah, that was coax Ethernet.
- jgalt212 10y agowith the vampire taps: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vampire_tap https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vampire_tap
- EvanAnderson 10y agoThin-wire Ethernet didn't use vampire taps, however. Everything was terminated in BNCs.
- davidw 10y agoI wonder what Analytics uses to store data these days. That's an awful lot of data they've got coming in.
- blahi 10y agobig table.
- fishnchips 10y agoOr Spanner?
- AznHisoka 10y agoit is but it also can easily be sharded by customer so not as scary
- mikebay 10y agoWhy all this sudden google news outburst? Why?
- shostack 10y agoMy best guess is to drown out the story of them them nuking the Pixel sellers account (which was just reinstated because of the bad press). It was a big reminder to people how much trust they put in Google with their data and how little recourse they really have against a faceless algorithm.
- kevin_thibedeau 10y agoHave they fixed the referer spam problem yet?
- rhizome 10y agono
- nsomaru 10y agoYou can add a view and add a filter to that view which filters requests which have domains of your choice in them. Add the domain(s) your site is hosted on and you'll get rid of most referrer spam; it seems like they call the GA API directly with your UA code, without providing a destination host. Caveat: the filter did not apply retroactively to my data and only started working from the date of its inception.
- snowwrestler 10y agoIf you do it with a segment instead of a filter, the effect is retroactive.
- jgalt212 10y ago> But the real killer feature IMHO, which was released in Urchin 6, was individual visitor history drill-down. If this sounds potentially, um, sensitive, that’s because it is. Google wouldn’t touch this feature and it was summarily axed, never to return. Any word on what this feature was? And do others currently offer an equivalent?
- GrinningFool 10y ago> And do others currently offer an equivalent? And this here is why I use ad blockers.
- cm2012 10y agoNo one touches PII
- jgalt212 10y agoI'm not so sure that's true. Especially, when you leave the ad-tech arena move on to the app monitoring arena where none of the PII data would leave the house (or there is certainly less of an incentive for the PII data to leave the house).
- vgeek 10y agoPiwik offers per user session tracking.
- shostack 10y agoGuessing it showed all the touch points of a given user. Most companies with deeper analytics have this first party data stored in their DB somewhere. Many CRMs can also provide this. It might take the form of a time stamped list of event data, page view data and categorized referred data.
- snowwrestler 10y agoThis is what marketing automation (MA) software does today (Marketo, Pardot, etc). It cookies every user and then collates site traffic data per cookie, so you can look up a single visitor and follow all their activity on your site. In contrast, software like Google Analytics collates data only by non-personal factors like URLs, browser, referrer, etc.
- collinmanderson 10y ago> Warren Buffett lent Goldman Sachs $5 BILLION on a hand-written note. Is this actually true? I googled it but couldn't find a source.
- david1234rob 10y agoGA is best tool for any website there are so many people who are offering same service paid but these are not as good as google learn more about it. http://buff.ly/2g7vORF http://buff.ly/2g7vORF
- SwellJoe 10y agoI really like this kind of post-mortem story; it doesn't do that thing that so many entrepreneurs do where they make it seem like they knew what they were doing all along. This makes it clear that for every great idea or success they had, there were setbacks that made it plausible that less steadfast individuals might have let it fold before they reached the goal. It's also nice to see a story with a realistic timeline; most acquisitions happen something like 7-10 years out. Overnight successes are extraordinarily rare, but get a lot of attention, because they make it seem easy, and people like to think that if they have a good idea, they can get rich overnight. And, I enjoy that the company was always small enough to where everyone knew each other, even at the end, even though they had a gazillion installs.
- rak00n 10y ago"Now that I’ve moved out of San Francisco, I wear Google shirts a lot more often." This made me laugh.