You're assuming that he did set up a landing page or modified the url. There is no evidence to suggest he did that.
Also, this article says nothing about facebook. It was ad-networks that the blank was run on.
Yes that would definitely tell him that people without JS turned on were viewing his page. It would not magically tell him that these came from facebook (or should have).
The point of my article was not on how the dev was detecting JS. So I didn't want to go into detail on it. Even if he did that (which he never claims he does) He would only see that people are coming in with JS turned off, not that they came from facebook.
I wouldn't say it's completely useless as it shows that Mongo is faster in a single threaded process, using the most popular ruby client of each system.
If I were writing a high-concurrency multi-threaded system to handle millions of keys at a time, Ruby would not be my first choice by far.
I personally think that NoSQL isn't always the right tool for the job. Yes, it scales. Yes, you don't need to structure your data. Yes, it is fast and distributed and can be redundant. To that I say, it is too new, it has a steep learning curve, there aren't any tools to abstract away the database portion.
Now SQL has ease of use, a myriad of tools such as ActiveRecord, or Hibernate, an ANSI specification. All of which allow developers to quickly pump out a site that will handle the needs of 98% of the businesses out there.
There is no need for a small time web store to be using a Hadoop Cluster, just like we wouldn't expect Google to be running on a MySQL backend.
As someone who has worked in both sides of the industry, I can definitely say that trying to integrate a NoSQL solution with a standard 3 Tier type website would increase the cost of development 10 fold. Sure, you can get it with no license fee, but you end up paying for it elsewhere.
Basically it boils down to NoSQL != NoPricetag
P.S> I recently wasted a week of my life trying to get HBase up and working on a small cluster with the data from our Vertica solution. I ended up using InfoBright and got it up and data loaded in a few hours. I am still open to the NoSQL idea for our specific business, but why can't it be just as easy?