I guess I am G basher but not without personal reason – they entered the WebAnalytics market and offered what my company had been doing for many years free of charge (this is what monopolies can do).

I am getting over it now as I managed to sell WebtraffIQ.
I now use GA on daily basis and I am even developing a few APIs for it. So, onwards and upwards

Marcos

Marcos: For G’s competition, I would say Yahoo in the UK/US, Baidu in China, Yandex and Mail.ru in Russia, Makoob in the Middle East, Naver in Korea and Yahoo throughout most of Asia etc. Microsoft search and advertising solutions are actually very small in terms of market share – about the same as for Ask.com. The point is, there are (and has been) plenty of competition. Any one remember Alta Vista, Infoseek, Lycos or Excite?

All of these are free to use – there is no compensation from Microsoft et al if suddenly people can no longer find you on Bing or Live.

As for exit strategies – I can’t speak for Larry or Sergey, but I don’t think money is their objective any more (I am not sure it ever was).

BTW, Marcos – you are a well known G basher and you know it

‘A unique feature of the web, is that the competition is only one click away. There is no contract or tie with Google products that forces people to use them. If they did not have good, trust worthy products, Google’s business model would collapse – and rapidly. That’s why there is no conflict of interest for G.’

1.) The competition is just Microsoft this makes this particular business area a duopoly, this is not good so much so that there are strict legal regulations governing duopolies which don’t seem to apply online?
2.) Having no contract is at the crux of the privacy and trust discussion. ‘If’ G did start passing the data is holds to third parties there would be no damages no compensation and no reparation.
3.) G is a business in business to make money. Most if not all businesses have exit strategies which usually consist of full or partial trade sale. Quite sure that holding company data is a big asset on the books.

R

Marcos Richardson
Head of SEO & Analytics

I most assuredly am not on the right wing side of this discussion. I do almost everything online. I try to pay attention to security and privacy, but I refuse to live my life in fear. I listen to all sides of the discussion, and form my opinions after personal reflection. I’ve read numerous articles on the potential issues with a search engine pricing ads based on conversion metrics obtained from clients analytics data. It is a very real possibility, and would be very difficult to prove or even be aware of.

That said, I’m not a GA hater. I regularly implement it for clients. I see your points, but maintain my points are valid as well. I find that anyone with a strong opinion probably has underlying motivations that aren’t being presented.

A unique feature of the web, is that the competition is only one click away. There is no contract or tie with Google products that forces people to use them. If they did not have good, trust worthy products, Google’s business model would collapse – and rapidly. That’s why there is no conflict of interest for G. On the contrary, fooling with data will lose Google large volumes of Search users and therefore its advertising revenue. I can’t think of a stronger reason not to mess with data.

In terms of the GA TOS, of course Google wishes to improve its services for everyone – advertisers, web site owners and end-users (the web public). It will use any data available in order to improve products and services – isn’t that good business? But that does not mean that they look at an individual GA account – that would be pointless. When you have billions of data points available, why focus in on one? Doing so will drive some very flakey business decisions.

BTW, what about Yahoo Web Analytics?