Google Acquires Urchin

GOOGLE AGREES TO ACQUIRE URCHIN

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. - March 28, 2005 - Google Inc. today announced it has agreed to acquire Urchin Software Corporation, a San Diego, California based web analytics company.

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Urchin is a web site analytics solution used by web site owners and marketers to better understand their users' experiences, optimize content and track marketing performance. Urchin tools are available as
a hosted service, a software product and through large web hosting providers. These products are used by thousands of popular sites on the Internet.

Google plans to make these tools available to web site owners and marketers to better enable them to increase their advertising return on investment and make their web sites more effective.

"We want to provide web site owners and marketers with the information they need to optimize their users' experience andps generate a higher return-on-investment from their advertising spending," said Jonathan Rosenberg, vice president of product management, Google. "This technology will be a valuable addition to Google's suite of advertising and publishing products."

The acquisition is subject to customary closing conditions. Google anticipates that the acquisition will close before the end of April.

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Now what does this mean?

Well, I thought this announcement is odd, unless you consider this thread (subscription required) at Webmaster World started by Brett Tabke.

In summary Brett suggests that a major search engine may soon stop leaving referral tracks in webmaster's logs by changing its method of sending searchers to pages using Post instead of Get.

This is all technical stuff, but it basically means that none of the current website analytics / referral tools will be able to determine what term a search from Google was.

Now, what if they hooked their newly acquired Urchin analytics into the Google search; suddenly there is only one web stats tool that can show you what terms your Google traffic is using to visit your site.

On the other hand, this could just be an additional defensive measure to fend off the upcoming MSN advertising program, and the upcoming Yahoo contextual ad program for publishers, just another tool to add to the conversion tracking tool... Interesting.

Time will tell.