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Google Analytics - that thing that everybody "is used by", on every website, and without even knowing [0] or explicit consent. [0] techies exempt.

• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• reitanqild 8y ago
  To add to that: they bought that. It used to be called Urchin I think.
  • geerlingguy 8y ago
    Yep, that’s where the ‘UTM’ in all the query strings comes from, Urchin Traffic Monitor I think it was. I used to have the standalone version installed which worked locally on servers and was completely independent of Google, but looked identical to Google Analytics at that time. Of course, Google realized they couldn’t mine any of the tracking data from the standalone version, so that was axed around like 2008 or 2009.
    • neurobashing 8y ago
      Urchin's original mode of operation was as a cron job that scanned your correctly-formatted Apache access_log (via LogFormat stanza) and dumped them into a DB. So there's issues of scale that had to be dealt with, and they decided to just dump it and go w/ the tracking JS.