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Comment by chaosmachine | Hacker News Reader

Unfortunately, Google Analytics is becoming increasingly less accurate as more and more people begin to use javascript blockers and other privacy tools.

This is especially a problem for sites with a high percentage of Firefox users, a significant portion of which are using the NoScript extension (it has almost 50 million downloads).

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And there are easy ways that Google could track people with javascript turned off. I always thought they would add this as a 'Pro' feature and charge money for that option. So you'd have to pay for the complete stats, most personal sites wouldn't care about non-javascript stats, while most commercial sites would gladly pay the fee.

It's probably in Google's interests to make better tracking available to everyone. But I think trying to avoid script blocking by using other means is only going to trigger a filtering arms race.

The "other means" is providing a way to submit/process the web server log files.

Google App Engine, you mean?

I don't mean Google App Engine, no. I'm not sure where you're getting that from, unless App Engine lets me upload my Apache logs into my Analytics account where GA will match up IP addresses to page views and whatnot... ? Not sure how it could since I'm not using App Engine for anything, even so I've googled around a bit for 'google app engine analytics' and I'm not finding any results about doing this for App Engine hosted sites either.

Well, that's true for all modern web analytics packages, no? Crunching Apache logs with AWStats is way more bogus given the ridiculous number of rogue bots on the web these days.

Based on my (very simplistic) tests, very few users of my business-oriented site block ads or javascript, but I'm sute it depends on the site. Most of my users are stuck on IE, after all.

I guess I feel this pain more than most, since a lot of my sites are aimed at web developers.

Well get back at them and use a bunch of non-degradable JS. Kidding... Sort of :)

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