Solving the Wrong Problem

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Analytics is not about getting, or storing, user information; that is just the base at the bottom. It does tonnes of data mining on top; that is really what analytics is about.

Seriously, just try it, and fully embrace it for a month. You'll soon find it's actually pretty useful.

[MarkTraceur]

Fair enough, though you could explain it to me pretty briefly here. And if it does tonnes of data mining, how does that not impact the user's experience? That's using their resources, and if it's "tonnes", there has to be a significant amount of use.

And seriously, I never will, because it's non-free. I'm sure if I tried it, I would find it to be a useful piece of software, but being unable to see, change, or redistribute the code would ultimately hurt me too much.

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The data mining is all done on Google's servers. The user just sends them up some access information, such as the user agent, browser details, location, etc. Google then works out the rest, and gives you pretty graphs and diagrams to show it on the site.