Visitor Identification Methods Through Urchin

If I save an interesting-page, I see a file named "urchin" in javascript format. But I did'nt find it if I sae mine. So, I try to find more about this item in google search engine. Finally, I found a site explained about it.

I will re-write here about the explanation so that I keep it in my this dear-blog directory.

The site explanation is folowing :

Overview

Urchin has five different methods for identifying visitors and sessions, depending on available information. Of these, the patent-pending Urchin Traffic Monitor (UTM) is a highly accurate system that was specifically designed to identify unique visitors, sessions, exact paths, and return frequency behavior. There are a number of visitor loyalty and client reports that are only available when using the UTM System. The UTM System is easy to install and is highly recommended for all businesses.

In addition to the UTM System, Urchin can use IP addresses, User-Agents, Usernames, and Session-IDs to identify sessions. The following table compares the abilities of each of the five identification techniques:

Ability	IP Only	IP+User-Agent	Username	Session ID	UTM
Identifies non-proxied sessions	X	X	X	X	X
Identifies some proxied sessions		X	X	X	X
Uniquely identifies each session				X	X
Defeats session IP proxying				X	X
Defeats most provider caching				X	X
Defeats browser caching					X
Uniquely identifies visitors			X		X
Captures exact path sequence					X
Captures visitor loyalty metrics					X
Captures browser capabilities					X

Data Model

The underlying model within Urchin for handling unique visitors is based on a hierarchical notion of a unique set of visitors interacting with the website through one or more sessions. Each session can contain one or more hits and pageviews. Pageviews are kept in order so that a path through the website for each session is understood. As shown in the diagram, the Visitor represents an individual's interaction with the website over time. Each unique visitor will have one or more sessions, and within each session is zero or more pageviews that comprise the path the visitor took for that session.

Proxying and Caching

In attempting to identify and track unique visitors and sessions, we are basically going against the nature of the web, which is anonymous interaction. Particularly troublesome to tracking visitors are the increasingly common proxying and caching techniques used by service providers and the browsers, themselves. Proxying hides the actual IP address of the visitor and can use one IP address to represent more than one web user. A user's IP address can change between sessions and in some cases multiple IP addresses will be used to represent a cluster of users. Thus, it is possible that one visitor will have different IP addresses for each hit and/or different IP addresses between sessions.

Caching of pages can occur at several locations. Large providers look to decrease the load on their network by caching or remembering commonly viewed pages and images. For example, if thousands of users from a particular provider are viewing the CNN website, the provider may benefit from caching the static pages and images of the website and delivering those pieces to the users from within the provider's network. This has the effect of pages being delivered without the knowledge of the actual website.

Browser caching adds to the question. Most browsers are configured to only check content once per session. If a visitor lands on the home page of a particular website, clicks to a subpage, and then uses the back-button to go back to the home page, the second request of the home page is most likely never sent to the website server, but pulled from the browser's memory. An analysis of paths may result in an incomplete path missing the cached pages.

In the above diagram, the actual path taken through the website by the client is shown at the top, while the apparent path from the server's point of view is shown at the bottom. In this case, before proceeding to Page-3 the user goes back to the Page-1. The server never sees this request and from its point of view it appears the user went directly from Page-2 to Page-3. There may not even be a link from Page-2 to Page-3.

Visitor Identification Methods

As mentioned previously, Urchin has five different methods for identifying visitors, sessions and paths. The more sophisticated methods which can address the above issues may require special configuration of your website. The following descriptions describe the workings of each method in more detail.

1. IP-Only: The IP-Only method is provided for backward compatibility with Urchin 3, and for basic IT reporting where uniquely identifying sessions is not needed. This method uses only the IP Address to identify visitor sessions. Thirty minutes of inactivity will constitute a new session. The only data requirements for using this method is a timestamp and IP Address of the visitor.

2. IP-Agent: The default method, which requires no additional configuration, uses the IP address and user-agent (browser) information to determine unique sessions. A configurable thirty-minute timeout is used to identify the beginning of a new session for a visitor. While this method is still susceptible to proxying and caching, the addition of the user-agent information can help detect multiple users from one IP address. In addition, this method includes a special AOL filter, which attempts to reduce the impact of their round-robin proxying techniques. This method does not require any additional configuration.

3. Usernames: This method is provided for secure sites that require logins such as Intranets and Extranets. Websites that are only partially protected should not use this method. The Username identification is taken directly from the username field in the log file. This information is generally logged if the website is configured to require authentication. This method uses a thirty-minute period of inactivity to separate sessions from the same username.

4. Session ID: The fourth visitor identification method available in Urchin is the Session ID method, which can use pre- existing unique session identifiers to uniquely identify each session. Many content delivery applications and web servers will provide session ids to manage user interaction with the webserver. These session ids are typically located in the URI query or stored in a Cookie. As long as this information is available in the log data, Urchin can be configured to take advantage of these identifiers. Using session ids provides a much more accurate measurement of unique sessions, but still does not identify returning unique visitors. This method is also susceptible to some forms of caching including the above example.

In many cases, the ability to use session ids may already be available, and thus, the time required to configure this feature may be short. For dynamically generated sites, taking advantage of this feature should be straightforward. The result is more accurate visitor session and path analysis.

5. Urchin Traffic Monitor (UTM): The last method for visitor identification available in Urchin is the Urchin Tracking Module. This system was specifically designed to negate the effects of caching and proxying and allow the server to see every unique click from every visitor without significantly increasing the load on the server. The UTM system tracks return visitor behavior, loyalty and frequency of use. The client-side data collection also provides information on browser capabilities.

The UTM is installed by including a small amount of JavaScript code in each of your webpages. This can be done manually or automatically via server side includes and other template systems. Complete details on installing UTM are covered in the articles later in this section.

Once installed, the Urchin Traffic Monitor is triggered each time someone views a page from the website. The UTM Sensor uniquely identifies each visitor and sends one extra hit for each pageview. This additional hit is very lightweight and most systems will not see any additional load. The Urchin engine identifies these extra hits in the normal log file and uses this additional data to create an exact picture of every step taken by the users. This method also identifies visitors and sessions uniquely so that return visitation behavior can be properly analyzed. While this method takes a little extra time to configure, it highly recommended for comprehensive detailed analytics.

Satellite Destruction Using Google Earth And Orbitron

Thomas Claburn in InformationWeek said :

After a brief stop by Wikipedia to brush up on China's destruction of its Feng Yun 1C weather satellite in January, you download Sebastian Stoff's Orbitron satellite tracking software and Google Earth, to make your attack easier to visualize.

You plot a "solution" or flight plan that takes into account the liftoff phase, the controlled orbit insertion phase, and the ballistic fall onto the target. You double check your math, because you've got a small chunk of change invested in this scheme

Google asked the judge to extend the court's oversight of Microsoft.

A day before Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly is scheduled to review Microsoft's compliance with the terms of the agreement that settled federal and state antitrust cases against the company, Google asked the judge to extend the court's oversight of Microsoft.

Microsoft was supposed to go free, at least partially, on Nov. 12, 2007. Thanks to Google, the world's largest software company may remain on probation for a while longer.

Citing "Microsoft's history of aggressively minimizing the impact of court-ordered relief," Google said on Monday that the changes Microsoft promised to make in Windows Vista last week to accommodate competing desktop search software providers are vague and need to be clarified.

"The Court and the public would benefit greatly from a description of the precise measures Microsoft is planning to implement and the practical effect they will have on users of desktop search," Google said in its legal filing.

Microsoft is required to keep its "middleware" open to third-party developers to make up for its past anti-competitive behavior.

When the joint status report was issued last week by the U.S. Department of Justice, 17 state attorneys general, and the District of Columbia, Google's chief legal officer David Drummond offered a qualified endorsement of the steps Microsoft agreed to take to address the government's concerns. The remedies, he said, "should be improved further to give consumers greater access to alternate desktop search providers."

In Monday's filing, Google clarified its objections. "For example, it appears that Microsoft will continue to show its own desktop search results when users run searches from prominent shortcuts and menu entries throughout the operating system, though users will now be given a mechanism to request results from their chosen desktop search product by taking a second step after they have first viewed results from Microsoft's product," the filing states.

Google also claims that Microsoft "may intend to remove [menu entries in the Vista Start menu and in various 'right-click' menus] from Vista and deprive users of these access points altogether rather than provide the user choice [under the terms of Microsoft's agreement with the government]."

And Google also objects to "the automatic invocation of Microsoft's desktop search product following the boot sequence," which it notes Microsoft is planning to address only by providing unspecified technical information to companies and users.

Microsoft's allies, unsurprisingly, disagree with Google's call for continued oversight.

"Media reports of secret complaints and 11th hour court filings by Google show they are desperate to hamstring their competition in the courtroom rather than compete in the marketplace," said Jim Prendergast, executive director of Americans for Technology Leadership, in a statement. "It's outrageous that they would disregard an agreement reached by the Department of Justice, the state attorneys general, and Microsoft to file a last-minute complaint to advance their own selfish interests."

Americans for Technology Leadership is a tech industry interest group that counts Microsoft as its most prominent member. It frequently issues press releases that one might easily mistake for official Microsoft news releases, such as "Global Shipment of Windows Vista Great News for Consumers."

In 2001, the Los Angeles Times published an article linking the group to what was ostensibly a grassroots letter-writing campaign aimed at promoting settlement of antitrust charges pending against Microsoft at the time.

Google asks gov't to fight censorship

By CHRISTOPHER S. RUGABER, AP Business Writer

WASHINGTON - Once relatively indifferent to government affairs, Google Inc. is seeking help inside the Beltway to fight the rise of Web censorship worldwide.

The online search giant is taking a novel approach to the problem by asking U.S. trade officials to treat Internet restrictions as international trade barriers, similar to other hurdles to global commerce, such as tariffs.

Google sees the dramatic increase in government Net censorship, particularly in Asia and the Middle East, as a potential threat to its advertising-driven business model, and wants government officials to consider the issue in economic, rather than just political, terms.

"It's fair to say that censorship is the No. 1 barrier to trade that we face," said Andrew McLaughlin, Google's director of public policy and government affairs. A Google spokesman said Monday that McLaughlin has met with officials from the U.S. Trade Representative's office several times this year to discuss the issue.

"If censorship regimes create barriers to trade in violation of international trade rules, the USTR would get involved," USTR spokeswoman Gretchen Hamel said. She added though that human rights issues, such as censorship, typically falls under the purview of the State Department.

While human rights activists are pleased with Google's efforts to fight censorship, they harshly criticized the company early last year for agreeing to censor its Web site in China, which has the second-largest number of Internet users in the world.

The company defends its actions, saying the Chinese government made it a condition of allowing Chinese users access to Google Web pages. China has an Internet firewall that slows or disrupts Chinese users from accessing foreign uncensored Web sites.

Censorship online has risen dramatically the past five years, belying the hype of the late 1990s, which portrayed the Internet as largely impervious to government interference.

A study released last month by the OpenNet Initiative found that 25 of 41 countries surveyed engage in Internet censorship. That's a dramatic increase from the two or three countries guilty of the practice in 2002, says John Palfrey, executive director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School, who helped prepare the report.

China, Vietnam, Saudi Arabia, India, Singapore and Thailand, among others, are increasingly blocking or filtering Web pages, Palfrey says.

Governments "are having more success than the more idealistic of us thought," acknowledges Danny O'Brien, international outreach coordinator at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Still, even government filtering isn't always successful. In a brutal regime like Iran, which filters Web content, there are nearly 100,000 bloggers, making Farsi "one of the most blogged languages in the world," says Palfrey.

Google's YouTube has become a common target for thin-skinned rulers. Turkey in March blocked the video-sharing site for two days after a complaint that some clips insulted Turkey's founding father, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk.

Thailand continues to block YouTube after several videos appeared in April, criticizing the country's monarch.

Bloggers in Morocco said in late May that they could not access YouTube shortly after videos were posted critical of that nation's treatment of the people of Western Sahara, a territory that Morocco took control of in 1975. A government spokesman blamed a technical glitch.

One likely source for Google's censorship idea is a paper written two years ago by Timothy Wu, a professor at Columbia Law School, who argues that downloading a Web page hosted in another country effectively imports a service.

Drawing on that concept, Google envisions using trade agreements to fight back. The negotiated pacts would include provisions guaranteeing free trade in "information services." As is true of most trade pacts, the provisions would call for arbitration if there are violations.

The U.S. has a trade agreement with Morocco and began negotiating one with Thailand in 2004, although those talks were suspended early last year after a military coup.

Columbia's Wu said the trade pact approach is likely to be more effective when governments are guilty of blocking entire Web sites or applications, such as Internet phone-calling, than when they filter specific content.

Under World Trade Organization rules, countries can limit trade for national security or public moral reasons, Wu said, exceptions that authoritarian governments would likely cite when filtering politically sensitive material.

The company's trade initiative reflects Google's increasing acceptance of the value of federal lobbying. The company didn't hire a lobbyist until 2003, according to public filings, but paid the high-powered Washington-based Podesta Group $160,000 last year to work on Internet free-speech, tax and other issues.

Human rights groups say Google's censorship efforts seem sincere, albeit motivated by bottom-line incentives.

"Free expression is a unique selling point" for a company like Google, O'Brien said. Filtering and censorship "diminishes the value of their product."

Yet last month at the company's annual meeting, Google's board recommended investors vote against a shareholder resolution urging Google to renounce censorship.

The resolution was defeated, although Google is already acting on some of the proposal's ideas, including working with other technology leaders, such as Microsoft Corp. and Yahoo Inc., to develop a set of principles on how companies should respond to censorship and other human rights violations when doing business abroad.

Human rights advocates, academics and corporate social responsibility groups are involved in the project, announced earlier this year.

Meanwhile, Google's global growth efforts continue. YouTube said Tuesday that it plans to expand into nine other countries, including Brazil, France, Spain and Poland, offering local-language Web sites and highlighting videos of domestic interest.

In China, where Google is the No. 2 search engine behind the domestically based Baidu.com, the company said in April it will increase its investment as it works to create more content of interest to Chinese users.

About Google and Intel to Online Press Conference to Discuss Computing and Climate Change

Forbes.com:

Google Inc., Intel, and several other global corporations and environmental groups. WHAT: Online press conference to discuss new opportunities in computing and climate change. WHEN: Tuesday, June 12, 10:00-11:00 AM, PDT. WHERE: A link to the online webcast will be made available Tuesday morning from the Google Podium on the web at:

http://www.google.com/press/podium.html

About Google Inc.

Google's innovative search technologies connect millions of people around the world with information every day. Founded in 1998 by Stanford Ph.D. students Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Google today is a top web property in all major global markets. Google's targeted advertising program provides businesses of all sizes with measurable results, while enhancing the overall web experience for users. Google is headquartered in Silicon Valley with offices throughout the Americas, Europe and Asia. For more information, visit www.google.com.



About Intel

Intel, the world leader in silicon innovation, develops technologies, products and initiatives to continually advance how people work and live. Additional information about Intel is available at www.intel.com/pressroom. Information on Intel's environmental programs and policies is available at http://www.intel.com/intel/other/ehs/.

Google is a trademarks of Google Inc. All other company and product names may be trademarks of the respective companies with which they are associated.

Other Link :

Google has gone all googly-eyed over plug-in hybrid vehicles, pledging more than $10 million in funding for the nascent technology. At a sunny photo op at its Mountain View, Calif., headquarters yesterday, company officials showed off a handful of Toyota Prius and Ford Escape cars that had been modified to ...

Microsoft to Change Desktop Search - Forbes.com

Forbes.com: "Microsoft Corp. will make changes to the program that helps Windows Vista users search their hard drives, in response to antitrust complaints from Google Inc., according to a U.S. Justice Department report issued late Tuesday."

Google (nasdaq: GOOG - news - people ) filed a 49-page document with the Justice Department in April claiming Vista's desktop search tool slowed down competing programs, including Google's own free offering, and that it's difficult for users to figure out how to turn off the Microsoft (nasdaq: MSFT - news - people ) program.

Microsoft initially dismissed the allegations, saying regulators had reviewed the program before Vista launched. However, Brad Smith, Microsoft's general counsel, said in an interview last week that the company was willing to make changes if necessary.

Tuesday's regularly scheduled status report on Microsoft's post-antitrust business practices detailed a compromise that would give computer users clearer options for picking a non-Microsoft desktop search program.

Currently, when Vista users browse through their documents, access the control panel, or do other system-related tasks, a Vista search box appears in the upper-right corner of the window. That box will remain, and it will continue to use the Microsoft search engine, but Microsoft will also add a link to the default desktop search program. LINK

Use Google Search Like A Pro

This is about How to Use Google Search Like A Pro.

Many who use Google do not realize that there’s actually an art to searching on Google. Learning this art will not only save you time but also improve your search results.

In a Recent Article on Small Business Hub, blogger Dharmesh Shah shared some of his tips to using Google search like a Pro. Dharmesh may not be a Google expert but his experience with using Google Search is clearly shown in his article.

Dharmesh’s 12 Tips are presented to you in the order below:

• Explicit Phrase
• Exclude Words
• Site Specific Search
• Similar Words and Synonyms
• Specific Document Types
• This OR That
• Phone Listing
• Area Code Lookup
• Numeric Ranges
• Stock (Ticker Symbol)
• Calculator
• Word Definitions

To view these Tips in detail you’ll have to click on the link provided below.

Readers take note this article is for beginners and experts alike. Why experts?

Dharmesh says:

" if you are a technology geek, and can use Google like the best of them already, then I suggest you bookmark this article. You’ll then have it on hand when you are ready to pull your hair out in frustration when watching a neophyte (Beginner) repeatedly type in basic queries in a desperate attempt to find something".

In conclusion, If you’ve been using Google in it’s simplest form, it’s really time to change your ways.

Source : http://marketingsqueeze.com