Search engines & privacy

The current Big 3

A brief search engine primer

Search engines have changed the computing world, become a mainstay of the Internet, and have changed the marketing landscape in ways never thought possible. Initially, a search engine was designed to find keywords in a manually created index of all websites, or information on the world wide web. In it's earliest state, a search engine was a simple query or a program. Today, a search engine is much more than just a simple query. Now they have evolved into complex systems that span data centers and are the bread and butter of global corporations. 

Universal Analytics - One Step Closer to Becoming Omniscient!

Universal Analytics

Google Analytics < Universal Analytics?

Over the past few weeks we have analyzed, examined, studied, pontificated, and expounded upon all of the benefits (and potential issues 1 ) of using Google Analytics. To add fuel to that fire Google released a new tool called Universal Analytics. With UA, we have at our finger tips a variety of new possibilities in the analytics space, specifically:

• Use the Measurement Protocol to integrate data across multiple devices and platforms.

• The Measurement Protocol introduced by UA lets you collect and send incoming data from any device to your Analytics account, so you can track more than just websites. Leverage the new analytics.js code and new developer reference libraries from the Measurement Protocol to see how users interact with all of your devices — smartphones, tablets, game consoles, and even digital appliances.

• Improve lead generation: Sync offline and online data.

• With UA, you can track data from all your online and offline customer contact points, like marketing campaigns, sales calls, and store visits, so you can discover relationships between the channels that drive conversions. Because UA is primarily an innovation in data collection methods, there are no new reports showing cross-device data.

• Define your own dimensions & custom metrics.

• Custom dimensions and custom metrics are like default dimensions and metrics in your Analytics account, except you create them yourself. Use them to collect data that Google Analytics doesn’t automatically track.

• Understand how well your mobile apps perform.  

• Mobile App Analytics captures mobile app-specific usage data and integrates it with your Google Analytics account, where you can reapply your knowledge of web analytics to dedicated app reports. (Currently in beta.) 2