Yui hosting, google maps, jQuery - an easy way to monitor website usage?
Yahoo's Javascript Library (YUI), JQuery and more so all Google Maps allow you to link to their files in the following format:
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://yui.yahooapis.com/2.6.0/build/yahoo-dom-event/yahoo-dom-event.js"></script>
Executes a script request from its servers, which will also pass an HTTP referrer to its web server. Do you use Yahoo etc. to generate statistics on which websites are getting some traffic? Or is it a conspiracy theory?
Of course, their servers will in most cases be much faster than any small company would buy, so using a hosted version of the script makes more sense.
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Chris
I am working on the YUI team at Yahoo.
We only accept YUI on yui.yahooapis.com; Google hosts YUI and many other libraries on their CDN. I can tell you from the Yahoo side that we do not control the use of the YUI site from our CDN. We track the overall growth in yui.yahooapis.com usage, but we do not track which sites are generating traffic. You are right to suggest that we can track usage - and we clearly state in our hosting documents that you should use this type of service if the traffic logs generated on our side do not pose a privacy issue for you.
In general, I don't think CDN traffic to use a library is a reliable measure of anything. Most of the time using YUI, even in Yahoo, does not use yui.yahooapis.com or the Google equivalent, and I'm sure the same is true for other libraries. And even if the site uses YUI from our servers, we will not have comprehensive traffic data that you get from Google Analytics or Yahoo Analytics, because not all pages will use YUI or CDN evenly.
Given the benefits of a hosted service, including SSL from Google and combined YUI processing from Yahoo, I see CDN as a big win for most performers with a slight downside.
-Erik
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Of course they create statistics - at least they need to know how much resources they are spending on hosting these scripts. And it's also nice to know who is using your code.
I don't think this is bad.
And using the hosted version makes even more sense because your visitors might have the script already cached after visiting another site.
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Of course, they can easily get statistics on which sites are using YUI and how often, as well as which parts of the YUI API are more popular (among smaller sites). However, they may not know what exactly website visitors are doing with their libraries.
Considering that they (Google and Yahoo) index a lot of web pages, they can get even more accurate statistics if they analyze their indexes. Therefore, you cannot hide that you are using YUI if your site is public.
The same goes for Google Maps and jQuery.
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