Google Buys Urchin Web Analytics

sho222 writes "Business Week, BMP Today, and others are reporting that Google agreed late Monday to aqcuire Urchin Software Corporation. Urchin boasts that their web analytics and marketing intelligence software is used by millions of sites worldwide and 20% of Fortune 500 companies. Google's VP of Product Management explains that, "This technology will be a valuable addition to Google's suite of advertising and publishing products." The deal is set to close in late April."

Google's already been there.

I found this image [urchin.com] on the website here [urchin.com].

Google had a decent stake for a while ;-)

Re:Not all that significant

Damn... you mean all those MSN Bot hits on my site don't mean I'm about to get bought out by Microsoft for millions of dollars?

Excuse me, I'm got a Ferrari to return.

This is pretty exciting.

In addition to being the penultimate search engine, Google is becoming quite feature-rich as well. It's pretty interesting to realize the subtle way in which they've risen to the top by simply providing what people want -- no more, no less -- in this age when we are saturated with online advertising on every other Internet site.

So cheers to Google.

Re:This is pretty exciting.

In addition to being the penultimate search engine

What is the ultimate search engine?

(If I get a Hitchhicker's Guide answer, I'm going to strangle someone.) ;-)

Re:This is pretty exciting.

LOL! Close, very close. :-)

The answer is, "The search engine that comes after Google." Which, if you think about it, makes for a really annoying reason to use the word "penultimate". :-)

Re:This is pretty exciting.

In addition to being the penultimate search engine

Google is the next to last [reference.com] search engine?

Politics makes strange bedfellows...

...but capitalism makes excellent ones.

This is an excellent match. It makes perfect sense that a web advertising company would buy a web analytics company, and I can't wait to see the results show up in AdSense.

i hope

I just hope that Google stays consumer and user-oriented instead of investing more time in arcane fields like traffic analysis, or the route IBM has gone, "e-solutions." This seems like a step in the wrong direction; it's not like Google is seeking to be recognised among high-profile companies....Google, isn't it time to start writing end-user software?

Re:i hope

I was actually taken back by how much Google employees will stand by the principle of meeting end-user needs.

At a information session for Google at our university, they showed us how they could make graphs of frequency statistics for certain search words. Sort of the stuff you'd find in the Google Zeitgeist [google.com] but as a graph for a particular word over time. For example, they showed a graph for a search on 'Summer Olympics' which spiked during the most recent Winter Olympics.

I asked them if Google had ever considered selling some of these statistics to businesses trying to analyze trends, just in bulk numbers (no privacy violations etc). I would figure it would be easy for them to implement, and another source of revenue. The presenters (who were actual engineers for Google, not just some PR folks) frowned upon that idea because they claimed that "it would not directly benefit end users." I asked how it could harm the user, but they insisted that if the user were not to benefit from it, they were not going to consider doing it.

We are not Google's customers, we are product.

Never forget, we are not Google's customers.

We are their product.

We buy nothing from Google, the advertizers pay Google, not us.

We are merely eyeballs to sell.

I do love google

However I worry about their rapid asscention into a computer gaint. With this purchase they add to their already impressive profile as an inovative technology leader. I'm sure MS looked much the same way back in the early 90s. I've been using yahoo more lately but their interface is far too confused to make me want to use them regualarly. Now repersents a time when google open to an attack from a well directed company who has the software to compete with them in the scearch market. Lets hope that google doesn't go monoply on us.

Urchin Rocks

I've been singing the high praises of Urchin 6 (this is the promo piece) [urchin.com] since I first saw it. Urchin 5 in and of itself is pretty addictive. The ROI tracking stuff and some of the other analyses that 6 provides will do wonders in terms of consolidating report generation and I suppose now AdSense and AdWords and things like that will be part of the package as well.

I for one, welcome our web analytics search data ROI overlords.

Marketing Analysis Bot says:

I know what you bought last summer. :p

Can they do no wrong?

I feel like a should be scared of how much influence and power Google is gaining - any corporation that size just HAS to evil, doesn't it? But they keep impressing me! Like Google Maps is 100x better than mapquest. They just keep rolling out great features, so I can't bring myself to fear them.

Urchin + Adsense

This makes perfect sense for Google. I would expect the Urchin software to begin "recommending" the use of a larger adsense/adwords campaign very soon, and that means a bigger war chest for Google.

deWORSification

Peter Lynch, in his pop-investor books, talks about young companies who suddenly come into a lot of cash through an IPO and stop innovating and try to grow via purchases of ever-expanding diversity. He calls this deworsification when companies grow out of their expertise. This isn't always bad--a company needs to grow after all--but it can often be a sign of a company that isn't going to be innovating the same way. Now, it's not like google just went out and bought a fast-food franchise (although 'google burger' has a nice ring to it), but If I was a stock holder in google I might be looking closely at this strategy and start looking around for another innovative start-up whose valuation isn't so high and who is concentrating on a smaller array of products.

Will they do something about the bloat?

I run a few websites on a managed dedicated server and one of the tools that we're offered is Urchin (version 5, I believe). I generally use awstats instead. Urchin is painfully slow to use and has the most horrible date-range system for reports that I've ever had the misfortune to use.

I wonder if Google will clean it up and make it run as smoothly as the main Google search page. It might not make me wince so much to use.

Just my opinion, of course. Your mileage may well vary.

Re:Will they do something about the bloat?

My mileage does indeed vary. I bought Urchin 5.x.x last week after doing a competitive analysis of the top contenders in the web analytics market. Urchin beat them all hands down in ver. 5 form, and version 6, which is in operation now as an on-demand service, will be out in software form in the next couple of months. The page overlay functions and goal tracking in 6 are the bee's knees and I cannot wait to use it.

And you talk about bloat? WebTrends 7 is a 245MB download. The entire Urchin install directory (for OSX) is 15MB decompressed. Hardly bloatware.

Very smart move

You can deride it as "big brother" etc by the fact is, hyper-tracking of web activity is going to be very very big business.

Of course there is only so much you can pull out of data, and many firms will get caught up in "analysis paralysis" and over-reliance on back-looking stats instead of risk taking on new ideas, but that realization will only come after billions have been spent chasing the dream of apparently being able to mind-read consumers.

This is the best web acquisition this year.

well

I know some webmasters have expressed their discomfort with Google's conversion tracking because Google gets a rough estimate on the ROI from Adwords campaigns. I wonder if they will have access to the data Urchin collects. If so this could put Google in control of some extraordinarly valuable data.

Well...

This can only make services like Adwords better. YES! NO MORE PSAs!

another takeover

Your uniqueness will be added to our own.

Urchin is awful

At least it was two years ago when I last used it. The numbers aren't reliable and doesn't have a good tool for building custom reports.

IMO, Nielson/Netratings is much better. It's the old RedSheriff system and is far better than any other reporting tool I've seen.

Google vs. Microsoft

I can remember not so long ago when most of the X-[acquires/buys/takes over]-Y stories were almost always about Microsoft grabbing up some little company.

These days, however, it seems like Google's on the takeover shopping spree.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again...

Google is becoming too big in too short of a period of time. Sure, Microsoft probably exploded just as fast, but look at where it's gotten them: They monopolize the OS and productivity market, using claims that open source is insecure and vulnerable to attacks and source poisoning.

Yes, there will always be a smaller, less popular alternative, but that doesn't do a whole lot for the person that sees advertisements for Google all over the place. Telling people to just use Google is very analogous to Windows being pushed in classrooms and retail centers.

Pardon me while I don my tin foil hat.

Bad news for Search Optimizers?

Google seems likely to make its Urchin-based tools available for free to its AdSense publishers and AdWords clients. Google's interest is in making ads more relevant, which in turn allows to to charge more for ads. That won't be happy news for search engine optimization (SEO) specialists [blogworks.net] who help site owners improve their visibility. If Google is offering user-friendly traffic analysis tools, are site owners likely to pay SEO firms? Some will, but this will make do-it-yourself search optimization much easier.

Google Hosting back on?

It looks like google's hosting rumors are back on after this acquisition.

Re:ok then

How about vivisimo [vivisimo.com]? The name sucks, but the tool is great.

Re:ok then

This is pretty good: http://www.alltheweb.com/ [alltheweb.com]

If you have a mac and want a great search tool try DevonAgent:
http://www.devon-technologies.com/products/devonag ent/overview.php [devon-technologies.com]

Re:Slashdot.

I believe you are confusing slashdot with this one [googledot.org].

no no no!

in Soviet Russia "web analyses you!", not "analytics webs you"! Sheesh.