Posted by Animesh K on 01/29/08 20:54

Michael Fesser wrote:
> .oO(Animesh K)
>
>> Michael Fesser wrote:
>>
>>> That's a lot more than just counting. I wouldn't call the server's
>>> logfile a "counter".
>> It's your choice then. I will still treat the ip-address, time of hit,
>> number of hit as a "counter vector" which is more sophisticated than
>> just 1, 2, 3, ...
>
> A logfile "counts" hits, that's it. The interpretation of the data is
> left to the logfile analyzer.
>
>>>> It would be better if you (both) sit and think what a (general) counter
>>>> would mean before telling us what google analytics is, or what it is not.
>>> 1, 2, 3, 4 ... this is counting. And that's what a hit counter does,
>>> nothing more. But GA _does_ a lot more than just counting.
>> hits per day, hits based on location, hits in the past 1 hour, trend of
>> hits, hits per month, hits to unavailable pages, .. all these are
>> (conditional) counters. Should I write a formula now?
>
> Most of these informations are not stored in logfiles, but extrapolated
> from them, using different algorithms. Different analyzers will lead to
> different results.


Agreed. But you can also think of many popular analyzers as a
conditional counter. I wonder if you have heard of the indicator functions.

To me a counter is just a summation of individual terms. The individual
terms *can be* a function of the raw data. The raw data need not be
displayed as it is.

[Back to original message]