
The origin story of Google Analytics - auston
https://urchin.biz/urchin-software-corp-89a1f5292999
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blakesterz
That 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).

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taf2
Funny I love the history of urhin but I think the measurement protocol is one
of the best things that had happened to GA. Also the user explorer interface
is great for understanding how individual users interact with your site too

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rwmj
Also 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)

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SippinLean
For a while the JS that Google handed off to you was "urchin.js"

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degenerate
For years, actually. I kind of chuckled when they finally changed it.

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fzn
_Urchin 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.u...](https://web.archive.org/web/20060223041140/http://download.urchin.com/urchin5/urchin5703_redhat9x.tar.gz)

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Anthony-G
While many web users don’t know that _utm_ in a URL stands for _Urchin Traffic
Monitor_ , there are also Red Hat users who don’t realise that yum stands for
_Yellowdog Updater, Modified_.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellowdog_Updater,_Modified](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellowdog_Updater,_Modified)

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SwellJoe
I not only remember it, it still makes me sick that they've replaced "yum", a
project with a name that rolls smoothly off the tongue like no other, with
"dnf", a project name that has all the grace of a running camel. (Also, it
makes me sad that Seth's lovely project will be forgotten now that he's gone.)

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buro9
The lessons learned at the bottom are fantastic. This is a must-read.

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davidw
I wonder what Analytics uses to store data these days. That's an _awful_ lot
of data they've got coming in.

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blahi
big table.

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fishnchips
Or Spanner?

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sargun
Nope, big table.

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ddorian43
Nah, bigtable is row-store (too much overhead). They probably use a column-
store. Do you have any link ?

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jgalt212
> 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?

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cm2012
No one touches PII

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jgalt212
I'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).

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SwellJoe
I 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.

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collinmanderson
> 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.

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patmcguire
Token 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=et...](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)

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EvanAnderson
I'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.

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Florin_Andrei
Yeah, that was coax Ethernet.

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jgalt212
with the vampire taps:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vampire_tap](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vampire_tap)

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EvanAnderson
Thin-wire Ethernet didn't use vampire taps, however. Everything was terminated
in BNCs.

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rak00n
"Now that I’ve moved out of San Francisco, I wear Google shirts a lot more
often."

This made me laugh.

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kevin_thibedeau
Have they fixed the referer spam problem yet?

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nsomaru
You 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.

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snowwrestler
If you do it with a segment instead of a filter, the effect is retroactive.

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mikebay
Why all this sudden google news outburst? Why?

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shostack
My 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.

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mrz1818
Great read! Thanks!

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m3rc
Long path up to just getting blocked by no-script

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_ao789
Yeah, go figure right..

