Perhaps the best part about the Accrue acquisition is that I’ll stop reading comments like

Datanautics relies on packet sniffing

As seen at Marketing Vox.

For the record, Accrue supported web server log files, NSAPI and ISAPI web server plug-ins, connectors to various ecommerce and application servers (e.g. Websphere, Broadvision, ATG), ODBC/SQL integration, various flat files, page tagging, etc. Oh, and network collection.

Eric is right that I didn’t shed any tears over the Accrue tech acquisition by I/PRO.

I had a nice chat with Allan Kaplan, CEO of I/PRO, the day before the press release went out. They simply held up on the press release so they could contact all the G2 customers beforehand, but I got the sense that since Guy Creese had outed them they decided to make it official. Allan claims he’s not a technologist but it’s clear he did his homework before picking up the technology.

I suspect most of I/PRO’s interest is around InfoCharger, the engine that powered G2. This is absolutely the right thing, since the G2 product itself hasn’t had a lot of investment since late 2001 or so. (That’s not to take away from the engineers that worked on it since, but the team was pared back to a skeleton crew that couldn’t really provide the innovation to keep up with the rest of the market.) But InfoCharger, the distributed, CORBA-based data engine, is still an amazing piece of work, and I know I/PRO (and perhaps Cydelity) will be using it to power their product offerings.

For what it’s worth, I appreciated Guy’s observation:

Back when NetGenesis was growing its business by marketing, Accrue was growing its revenue by doing heavy technological lifting.

Even up until the Datanautics thing happened, Accrue G2 was winning technology bake-offs. But no CFOs would pay for enterprise-class licensed software to a company that looked like it would go out of business. And thus it did.

There are a lot of lessons here. Maybe someday I’ll write some, but I’ve moved on and it’s not like I have some desire to purge some horrible memory.

Meanwhile, InfoCharger lives on in two companies now.

Now don’t get me wrong, I think Jupiter does good stuff and I like Eric Peterson. But when I keep reading things like Jupiter made the first splash about cookie deletion and even Eric saying that others are validating his findings, I just scratch my head.

At Y! we’ve been discussing this issue for a long time. Not because we’re super-insightful, but because back in the spring of 2004 (almost a year ahead of the Jupiter study), there was a study done by newspaper research firm Belden Associates that says .. wait for it … some 40 percent of users clear their cookies at least once a month.

Does it matter? Not really. Just that it’s not new news at all, so I’m baffled by the recent storm of discussion. Kudos to Jupiter for bringing it to the attention of the wider industry, because obviously it wasn’t well-known previously.

Last week at Emetrics I was speaking with a company doing vertical search. We discussed metrics like number of “next page” clicks, time to first click, and lots more, in order to measure the user experience. Metrics often take the place of real data, e.g. for inferring things like relevance of the search results.

So, thought experiment: Visitor A does a search, clicks on 15 links. Visitor B does a search, doesn’t click on any links. Visitor C does a search, clicks on 2 links. Average clicks per search is 5.66. Which visitor had the best experience?

The answer is that it depends on what the search term was.

• Visitor A typed santa barbara photos. They want to see lots of ’em. The fact that they looked at 15 is a good sign.
• Visitor B typed time in santa barbara. Poof, the time is on the results page. No need to click further.
• Visitor C typed santa barbara tourism, and was perhaps confused by both http://www.santabarbaraca.com/ and http://www.santabarbaraca.gov/. Still, the first two results seem to indicate a success.

So, it would be misleading to compute an average, and compare each result against the average. If you categorized your searches into terms like information, browsing, and general, you could group your searches and compute your metrics by category. You’d want your information searches to have low clicks, and browsing searches to have high clicks.

Guy Creese has a post about Datanautics, the company formed from the ashes of the old Accrue Software. Having done some detective work, Guy notes that analytics pioneer I/Pro is offering support for Datanautics customers, and have overlapping management teams.

I know Datanautics had been shopping the technology – last week, multiple vendors at Emetrics told me they’d been approached. So it looks like I/Pro ended up with it.

In 1996 when we were pitching the original business plan that would become Accrue, people would ask “how are you going to compete with I/Pro?” At the time, I/Pro was focused on services and auditing, not hard-core behind-the-firewall analytics, so our answer was that they were different beasts. Fast forward 9 years and there’s your answer…

So what happens to Datanautics? Last week two different people told me the company has changed direction, changed their name, and has something new in the works that leverages the existing technology. I was told the new name, but I don’t remember it.

I’ve long thought the technology underlying AccrueDatanautics G2 could be repurposed for lots of other large-scale analysis, the only sticking point was developing the expertise to build a solution using the technology. Have they done it?