Our Vendor Discovery Tool is Back Online

I have to admit I was a little surprised at how many people howled at me when I took the Vendor Discovery Tool offline a few weeks back, but I wanted you all to know it is back online. If you had the tool bookmarked you’ll have to update your bookmark and you may want to get in the habit of accessing it via the Research section of this site.

Why is that you ask? Funny story.

While the Vendor Discovery Tool is designed to be used by individuals researching the deployment of web analytics tools across the Internet, thanks to analytics I was able to identify a few folks who were abusing the script by running it via a what very much appears to be a bot.  Unfortunately the bot appears to have been accepting cookies and executing some tracking JavaScript but not all of it (e.g., I do not observe the same pattern in my Google Analytics or IndexTools deployments!)

Not naming any names, but here is the data data I’d been working from in Omniture Discover on Premise:

Gotta love analytics, huh?

I have since blocked the offending IP address range and continue to monitor the situation.  In the meantime, if you need web analytics vendor distribution data and don’t have the patience to run the script manually, please contact me directly since I’m easily able to do custom dumps of the data and typically don’t charge for the service.

Anyway, thanks to everyone who wrote me asking when the VDC would be back online and again, I’m super sorry for the inconvienience!