20 April 2009 | Author: Andrew Girdwood Head of Strategy

Is Google failing analytics providers?

This week Google announced a change in the URL at which search results appear. While that might seem like a minor adjustment, the move has a number of significant ramifications.

The new URL is widely believed to be a precursor to Google's switch to an AJAX-enhanced search results display. With AJAX, Google seeks to shave milliseconds off its results load time in order to serve more searches, use less bandwidth and make and save more money.

The new URL format may also contain useful digital and search marketing information, such as ranking information.

Another significant impact of the URL tweak is that some analytics programmes may need to be changed in order to continue reporting the keywords that drive traffic to a site.

Google announced the rollout of its new URL structure on its Google Analytics blog as an update to Google Analytics users and customers.

It did not, however, communicate the pending change with many analytics providers and seems to have given less than a week's notice.

Sean Hammons, founder of GetClicky - a popular web analytics platform, famous for its especially useful real time 'Spy' view - told bigmouthmedia: "The only place that this change was announced was on the Google Analytics blog, which does not count as 'notice' in my book.

"This should have been on the official Google blog and announced at least one month ahead of time. Luckily we're a small company so we were able to implement the change quickly, but the same can't be said for everyone."

The search giant may need to step more carefully in the analytics field in future. Writing as a guest author for TechCrunch, Eric Clemons, Professor of Operations and Information Management at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, spelt out what an antitrust case against Google might involve.

To bring an antitrust case against Google, the US Justice Department could argue that Google's actions were deterring market entry in areas that would benefit consumers. Arguably, by giving limited or no notice to analytic providers of significant changes, the search engine was doing just that.

The Department of Justice would also need to show that Google was using earnings from paid search to subsidise most of its other businesses. This would include Google Analytics, which is a free product.

The argument would state that Google is subsidising these businesses, deterring entry into the market for other companies and therefore giving Google the option of charging monopoly prices later on.

So, do Google's recent actions make it challenging for analytic providers and rivals to Google Analytics to enter the market? Sean Hammons says: "This particular change doesn't make it more challenging, I don't think, but what scares me if they actually move forward with the full AJAX search results they tested a few months ago.

"If that happens, then all analytics services other than Google's own offering won't be able to see what searches are leading people to web sites. Knowing the search terms driving traffic to your web site is arguably the most important reason to use any analytics service. This would be monopolistic, and Google would lose the goodwill of many web site owners."

Clicky helped outline initial concerns when Google was first caught testing AJAX-driven search results pages. A blog post on its site raised awareness of the tracking challenges and dead ends created by Google's initial experiments.

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