By: Tamar Weinberg

Rumor is floating around that Microsoft is about to come out with a free web analytics service which will rival Google Analytics. The project is currently called Gatineau and their welcome page is now live, but you can’t login just yet.

If this truly will be Google Analytics’s competition, I’m hoping this is going to address several shortcomings that I’ve found in Google Analytics, particularly the notion of inaccurate counts (especially when compared with Urchin, which is ironic given that Google purchased Urchin yet dropped its core functionality), the absence of the direct referral page in the analysis review, and complexity (especially for newbies — how about simple Urchin-like reports and an advanced view?)

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