Surveys are also conducted through phone surveys, postal mail and personal interviews. These surveys run from the typical demographic surveys, to surveys on net addiction, and surveys for sea surfers. However, there are limitations to surveys. However, despite their limitations, surveys today remain the main source of demographic information because of privacy concerns. Web users value their anonymity highly and are very concerned with having control of demographic information.
Surveys provide the simplest solution to user concerns at the moment.
It is also a way to gain information regarding web users and their usage patterns that cannot be collected from HTTP logs. Surveys need not be limited to a specific site or network of users as it is in logging. Guestbooks are similar to surveys except that they are placed on a specific set of web pages in which the guestbook author is interested in. Now also available through the Microsoft Internet Explorer, cookies provide a way that servers can save a set of limited information to the user's files. The information may include the domain server, unique value of the cookie, and a field for a server-defined code to identify the machine.