At the birth of the inernet things were relatively simple.  One would type a url in the browser and the file with test and links would be delivered. It was so simple.

Server somtime delivers errors like file is not opening or causing some other failure error.  One  smart guy at that time discoverd server error logs and leveraged them to find information about hits made on the webserver.

Now log files started to get larger,  and non-techie fellows started getting interst in the data.

Dr. Stephen Turner in 1995 wrote Analogs, was one of the first analysis program that was widely available on the web.

Around 1995-96 the general users of the internet started to get exposed to web statistics because of the thing called counters. A number shows instant visits/ views.

By the year 2000, with the popularity of the web growing exponentially, web analytics was firmly entrenched as a discipline. Companies like Web Trends, Accrue, WebSideStory and coremetrics were all firmly established as key vendor, providing incresinglycomplex soltions that reported massive ammounts of data.

But at the same time people recognise that the data produce by server logs have some challanges.

Page cached by an ISP:  The challange with the caching was that after the ISP had a copy of the page, all the subsequent pages would be served from the ISP, and the website logfile would not have enteries for those subsequent pages.

Search Robot: With the increasing popularity of search engine , search bots would frequently crawl sites and leave non-web users enteries in web logs/