We recently came upon an informative chart of search engine relationships created by BruceClay.com. The chart will help you understand where each search engine derives its data. Not surprisingly, Google and Overture (and to a lesser extent, Inktomi, Looksmart, and DMOZ) occupy central positions on the chart, feeding data to many of the other engines.
You can download the chart in PDF format from BruceClay.com.
Our soon-to-be-released report on web analytics will study the following metrics providers:
ASP Solutions:
Coremetrics - http://www.coremetrics.com/
Digimine - http://www.digimine.com/
DoubleClick - http://www.doubleclick.com/
IBM SurfAid - http://surfaid.dfw.ibm.com/
Red Sheriff - http://www.redsheriff.com/
Web Side Story Enterprise - http://www.websidestory.com/
WSS Hitbox - http://www.websidestory.com/
WebTrends - http://www.netiq.com/webtrends/default.asp
WebTrends Live - http://www.webtrendslive.com/
Software Solutions:
ClickTracks - http://www.clicktracks.com/
Commerce Server - http://www.microsoft.com/commerceserver/
E.piphany - http://www.epiphany.com/
Funnel Web - http://www.quest.com/funnel_web/analyzer/
Informatica - http://www.informatica.com/
LiveStats - http://www.deepmetrix.com/
Microstrategy - http://www.microstrategy.com/
Sane eBusiness - http://www.sane.com/
Sane Enterprise - http://www.sane.com/
SAS Webhound - http://www.sas.com/products/webhound/
Urchin - http://www.urchin.com/
WebTrends - http://www.netiq.com/webtrends/default.asp
We will compare price and level of sophistication, and will attempt to point out any major flaws with the individual solutions.
The following data comes to us from ClickZ columnist Bryan Eisenberg. We have grouped a number of website analytics tools as follows. Your feedback is always welcome.
| Level of Insight | ASP | Software |
| High | Digimine Coremetrics WebTrends | SAS Webhound Microstrategy ePiphany Informatica WebTrends |
| Medium | DoubleClick Red Sherriff Web Side Story Enterprise WebTrends | Commerce Server LiveStats Sane eBusiness WebTrends |
| Low | IBM SurfAid WebTrends WSS Hitbox | Funnel Web Sane Enterprise Urchin WebTrends |
The following data comes to us from ClickZ columnist Bryan Eisenberg. When deciding on your website analytics solution, the following elements should be kept in mind:
Your Needs:
- Customizability of Installation
- Site type / ROI Oriented
- Flexible - ASP / Software
- Real Time
- Accuracy and Reliability
- Depth of Reporting
Product Breadth and Depth:
- Scalability
- Upgrade / growth path
- Site type oriented
- Open API
- Interface is Easy to Use
- Plain English
Support:
- Technical Support
- Education services / options
- Customer Advisor Board
- Installation Services
Company:
- Stability - profitable?
- Longevity
- Core business / Focus
- Geographic reach
- Devotion to R&D
- Cross Platform
We recently developed a syndication feed using RSS, which allows other sites to syndicate our headlines and link to our content.
Details on how to set up a feed of this type can be found at: http://www.searchengineguide.com/kalena/2002/1220_kj1.html
An example of our feed follows:
By making changes to a simple file on our site, our headlines will automatically be updated across all of the sites that display the feed.
Once this feed was created, we submitted it to several content aggregators, including:
http://www.newsknowledge.com/
http://aggregator.userland.com/
http://www.newsisfree.com/
http://www.syndic8.com/
http://www.moreover.com/
We're tracking the results of all of this. In a future entry, I will report how many click-throughs that each of these sources has generated.