Yahoo must have adopted a strange new policy of putting acquisitions to good use, exhibited in its latest form by the announcement of Yahoo Web Analytics. Marketed as "an enterprise site analytics tool," the private beta of Yahoo Web Analytics reveals a clear initial focus on business and commercial web sites, and some unique features could give competitors like Google a run for their money.

Yahoo Web Analytics is the result of Yahoo's April acquisition of IndexTools, a web analytics software provider geared toward online marketing. With such a quick turnaround into a Yahoo product, albeit as a private beta for Yahoo's 150,000 small- to medium-size business web site customers, it's clear that Yahoo is gunning to gain share in a market it arguably should have been neck-deep in years ago.

Yahoo's choice to acquire IndexTools and the upcoming features in Yahoo Web Analytics also speak loudly for how badly the company wants a piece of the market. Specifically, Yahoo Web Analytics boasts "near real-time" data aggregation and visualization, which—if true—will be a significant leg up on Google Analytics' typical 8- to 12-hour turnaround time.

In addition to faster data, Yahoo will also provide all analytics data in raw form, instead of a periodic aggregation of things like total visitors to a page. This access to data becomes quite significant with Yahoo's promise of a forthcoming API, another feature that Google Analytics doesn't match—at least not yet. This API will allow developers to access data for things like aggregating popular content, comparing with other data sets, exporting for backup, or moving to another system.

Being Yahoo's primary competitor in the free analytics space, though, Google is unlikely to let this challenge go unanswered, especially since Yahoo now offers an appealing combination of hosting and analytics packages. If Yahoo wants to gain relevance in this space, it's going to have to act quickly and open the beta up to the rest of the market. Perhaps most importantly, Yahoo will have to get the API in the hands of developers before Google ramps up to feature parity and removes the temptation for customers to switch.