We got an email from Google today touting their Analytics product.  They claim to be able to help us 'get to know your customers better'.  What a joke.  Just about everything Google has done to their search engine of late has made it more and more difficult to figure out what our customers, and even more important, site visitors are doing.

In particular, ever since Google started encrypting search requests, we have no idea how or why people are finding our web site - or what they are seeing when they do find us.  Yes, there is general information available on both Analytics and Webmaster - but it is too generalized to be of use in serious analysis of our traffic.

And it seems there is very little synergy (oops .. sorry .. I generally hate buzz words.  but this one works here) between their services.  I makes absolutely NO sense to me why Google Search refuses to allow Google Real Time Analytics to 'see' the search phrase that brought a visitor to our website.

Of course, it doesn't really matter.  Google's main emphasis is money.  In particular money from ads.  Their claim to be improving the search experience for consumers is bogus - to say the least.  But that discussion can wait for another day.

Bottom line .. please do not use google search .. please switch to Bing, instead.