Another Way Google is Slowly Taking Over the World

News about Microsoft's recent plans to acquire Yahoo! in attempt to compete with the rapid growth of Google made me realize that Google is doing everything... literally. The word "Google" doesn't even show up underlined red when I type it. Wait... infact, the website I use to post this blog (Blogger.com) is now run by Google! That says something.

I find myself repeatedly amazed by the ingenuity and technological advancements of Google's new online services. As if Google Earth and Google Talk didn't leave me speechless (no pun intended), the other day at work I was introduced to what is now my favorite Google application of all time, at least until the Google Chili Cheeseburger comes out next May.

I've been working with a popular website at work lately and one of the ways the marketing team tracks the site traffic is with a tool called Google Analytics. I am a fan of metrics and useless specific data as nerdy as that sounds so this is right up my alley!

I can't even begin to explain the capabilities of this program. You put a tracker on your website that detects the visitors' IP address, and the next day you can use Google Analytics to view reports on very very specific details about the site traffic. So for example, the other day at at work I was playing with an account and was able to see stats like average page views per visitor, average time each page was viewed, how the visitors found the site (including what key words they used to find the site), trends in traffic over months, visitors broken down by region and even by city. So if I wanted I could view how many people in London visited my site for the first time on February 2nd.

It's a really amazing tool. Hopefully one day if my blog gets popular I'll use it to track site traffic on this blog. As of right now I wouldn't be able to stand seeing how few people read this... and even if I did get a good amount of views the brutal honesty of Google's analytical prowess would reveal it was only my roommate's computer that I used to check my own blog.... : (