Anyone else left "waiting for google-analytics"?

More and more frequently, when I try to visit sites like news.originalsignal.com, or attempt to follow links from ATS, I am getting a blank screen with a little message below in the loading info bar saying, "waiting for google-analytics". Is anyone else experiencing this?

While I haven't looked into this deeply, it seems to happen whenever I go somewhere "off beat" for lack of a better term too. The "waiting" never stops and it becomes essentially a dead-end - one of those you can't get there from here destinations.

Does this new experience have anything to do with net neutrality?

Is it an innocent Fire Fox (oops they just haven't gotten around to fixing it) issue? Are other browsers doing this too? Maybe it's a simple problem but it doesn't seem to happen on the mainstream sites. There are times when the only way I can actually get past the "waiting for google-analytics" blank screen is to backtrack and pull up a cached version of the page I was going to.

I'd just assume google left the analysis up to the reader on what I should or shouldn't read/view. Maybe it's a simple glitch but, I'm beginning to feel a bit nannied/miffed by this development. Any suggestions on why this is happening and if we must work around it - any suggestions on best ways to get over, under or around this little bugger?

Any help is appreciated! Thanks.
edit: added ? mark.

[edit on 6-9-2010 by DancedWithWolves]

reply to post by DancedWithWolves
I think this topic belongs in Computer Help forum, not science and technology.

Here is somebody who had a similar problem and reported it on google analytics:

www.google.com...

The reply they got suggested it might be a virus:

google analytics to my knowledge shouldnt be redirecting you to anywhere, it uses a simple cookie to log non personally identifiable information of site visitors, however it sounds like you have some kind of attempted browser hijacking or router hack going on.

They also give some advice on how to deal with it, hope that helps. I don't have that problem personally and I use Firefox too.

reply to post by DancedWithWolves


Just get something like the NoScript add-on for Firefox and completely block out Google-Analytics. You aren't allowed to block out adverts on ATS, but I would think you're allowed to block out Google-Analytics, some people don't want to be tracked on every single website they visit which uses GA (almost all of them).

Yes I had it for months and it got worse.

It's caused by Malware on your PC, so download Malwarebytes or something similar and let it do its job.. you shouldn't have any problems after that, I didn't.

I sometimes have a problem when I type a url, such as ATS, into my browser, it just brings me to a google image search, instead of bringing me to the website intended. Then, it won't allow me to go to that site at all, as it just brings me back to the google image search. What's even weirder, is that when this happens, I can still go to all other websites, just not ATS.

--airspoon

When you visit the site, they capture details about where you are, who you are, what computer you're using, and so on. This is logged to a database. Then the site owner can look up the details of who is visiting their website, which pages are being visited, products purchased, they can also track the page you entered from and the page you left to. That lets companies track the effectiveness of marketing campaigns, so if you get an email saying here's 20% off the new version and you follow the link to make a purchase they can see if you're worthwhile targeting for future campaigns and so on.

There is a very genuine and useful side to GA, there are plenty of readable books out there on how to do it for your website. I expect there is a nefarious side too, but that's for others to explain.

Any slowness probably comes down to slowness of their database servers in recording the details to a database, or other issue with their server farms.

How paranoid you want to get over this is up to you, for my money I wouldn't worry too much about it. What could you do anyway?