If you use Analytics on your website(s) — particularly on very small sites such as this one, where your own visits can significantly skew any traffic measurements — you have probably wished you could reliably exclude your internal page views from your traffic reports. Google provides a filter system, but it falls a bit short if you aren’t visiting from a static IP address.

Aa great solution has just arrived in the form of Adblock Plus version 1.0.1, which finally provides the ability to restrict the domains to which its ad-blocking rules apply.

After installing the Adblock Plus extension, add a filter rule of the syntax

google-analytics.com$domain=zoombody.com

(replacing zoombody.com with your own domain). Now, when you visit your own site, you will remain completely hidden from Google Analytics.

You could undoubtedly apply this to other hit counters; Analytics just happens to be the service I use.

We’ve found that certain search terms are good indicators of flu activity. Google Flu Trends uses aggregated Google search data to estimate flu activity in your state up to two weeks faster than traditional systems.

Now there’s an example of data mining we can all feel good about.

Via The New York Times. See also blog.google.org.